Why is this a discussion?
Torture is against the law.
The USA signed several treaties making it illegal.
Full stop.
The whole discussion once again shows that the US society is living in a 21st century country with 18th century morals. I heard cutting off a thiefs hands prevents relapsing…
So the study cited by Cory is wrong? Because if rapport-based interrogations are only four times as effective as torture, which you’re saying is completely ineffective, then raport-based interrogations are also completely ineffective.
Uhh… that’s what I said.
Well, the article says that the sympathetic approach was 14 times as effective, not 4 times as effective. What was 4 times as effective than torture was a “neutral, respectful” approach. But torture being ineffective doesn’t mean that a tortured person has a 0% chance to give you accurate information. If it is the case, though, that a tortured individual is less likely to give you correct information than an individual who is simply asked, respectfully*, then I would say that’s completely ineffective.
Imagine you had a medicine to treat Ebola that allowed 10% of the patients to survive and another medicine that allowed 90% to survive. You could say medicine B is 9 times as effective as medicine A, but since the survival rate of ebola is around 50%, another way to say it would be medicine A is a poison that kills people and medicine B is pretty good.
* I know that “a neutral, respectful tone” doesn’t mean just asking once and leaving it at that.
An interrogation technique that produces more wrong answers than right is completely useless as a source of intelligence. They may tell the trugh, they may remember what the truth is, they may not be merely parroting their torturers’ wishes. But you will never know.
So yes, torturing is completely useless for getting actionable intelligence but that is not and as far as I know never has been its purpose.
Maybe we’re reading different articles. I read that early disclosures were 14 times more likely, and overall confessions 4 times more likely, when a rapport-building approach was used.
Disclosure was 14 times more likely to occur early in an interrogation when a rapport-building approach was used. Confessions were four times more likely when interrogators struck a neutral and respectful stance.
I believe that “rapport-building approach” and “neutral and respectful stance” describe the same thing, and that the difference in language is used to avoid repetition.
In response to social strategies, detainees were more likely to disclose meaningful information [odds ratio (OR) = 4.2] and earlier in the interview when rapport-building techniques were used (OR = 14.17).
What isn’t reported is how long the different approaches takes, and whether tortures jump straight to torture without even first asking in a neutral and respectful way.
We can also find this snippet from the BPS site:
More surprising, cooperation reduced five-fold when detainees were presented with explicit evidence. It’s possible this is because interrogators were more likely to resort to presenting evidence to uncooperative detainees.
By this logic, isn’t it also possible that they resorted to torture with uncooperative detainees?
As some facetiously suggested above, maybe we really would need a random trial in order to tease out the relative efficacy of interrogation techniques.
But again, this is all a sideshow, because the question is not—and should not be—whether torture works. The question is whether we, as a society, are willing to torture people.
Opponents? These are my fellow humans who did this. Why do you suppose that they and I are opponents?
Deny that they understand me? You are putting words in my mouth there. And that leap to a conclusion dies make it hard to take your critique of me seriously. Ahem. 
That said, it is the motive that the article concludes, and I agree with its logic. By process of elimination it is the only motive left to torture.
Hmm, First let me just say that I think torture is immoral and those responsible for it deserve to be put in jail.
Second, I think the whole argument about it “working” is constantly made from ideological perspective and doesn’t really attack what each side means by “work”
It seems to me that torture forces people that are refusing to talk to talk. But those people more often then not lie. But they sometimes also tell the truth.
What I have heard from the CIA defenders is that when someone tells them a truth that confirms suspected truth and potentially verifies corroborated or partially corroborated intel and makes it actionable.
So does it yield independently reliable intel? No. Are non-torture techniques more effective and reliable? Yes. In a circumstance where a detained individual refuses to talk and other interrogation techniques are largely off the table, does it produce some small chance of yielding intel that could help your effort? It seems like it might.
But exactly what bwv812 said;
But again, this is all a sideshow, because the question is not—and should not be—whether torture works. The question is whether we, as a society, are willing to torture people.
Yup, this was my misreading.
But people have been studying torture for a long time. The idea that torture doesn’t work and isn’t good at getting information isn’t a terrible controversial one. This new ‘debate’ over the effectiveness of torture is similar to the climate change debate except that it is going against a larger volume of evidence.
I do think it matters that torture doesn’t work. Suppose killing a person didn’t actually prevent that person from committing another crime - surely that would weigh in on the capital punishment debate. Just because it is a moral issue, and we shouldn’t torture even if it is effective, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter that it’s not effective, particularly since a lot of people don’t seem to get the moral part of the argument. The fact is that torturing people is evil and stupid, and the only actual reason to do it is because you just like to.
Here’s the washington post from 2007:
Turns out torture doesn’t even force people to talk. Turns out that when someone is being brutally abused it’s hard to get them to say anything.
The control group is stint as a call centre employee.
I wonder if the CIA has any fan’s of Brazil’s Information Retrieval department, that’d be totally their style.
Some have accused the CIA of conducting experiments of just that sort.
Hey, I think torture is probably very effective at getting people to tell what they know. But it’s also effective at getting them to tell what they don’t know (although other forms of interrogation also get people to say things they don’t know, and [confess to things they didn’t do][1]; the investigator who obtained the false confession talked to my criminal-procedure class about how he unwittingly elicited the false confession by inadvertently salting his interrogation with facts and details the suspect incorporated into her confession). Despite this, this isn’t something this study proves or even pretends to address: it simply makes the suggestion that torture is a less-effective form of interrogation.
The difference is that executing people is legal in the US, while torture is not. I think it’s pretty clear that killing someone prevents them from committing another crime, yet this efficacy-against-recidivism argument isn’t really seen in countries that have already made the determination that state-sponsored executions are wrong.
Hey, there’s always going to be the argument that sometimes you just don’t have the time to do proper rapport-based interrogations, and that in those emergency contexts torture may provide decent intel. And even if the intel they produce is wrong because the suspect doesn’t know, there’s still a chance that lives may be saved.
[1]: This American Life story prompts $5M lawsuit over 1994 false confession - Current
Nobody with an ounce of understanding of history and psychology believes that torture produces accurate data. Hell, the Inquisitors of the Roman Catholic Church knew torture was worthless for extracting reliable information. The Nazis considered information taken from tortured prisoners of war to be virtually useless.
So why the hell do we still do it?
Simple: it feels good. It feels great to watch a naked “enemy” writhe in a puddle of his own piss and blood. It stirs the bloodthirsty glee that lives in each and every one of us when someone whom you believe has harmed you, your country, your ideals–whatever: someone who has in some way committed an offense against something or someone you hold dear–is at your utter mercy. Torturing “the bad guys” doesn’t give a scrap of worthwhile intel, but it feels GOOD–even more so than mowing down a bunch of ragheads in a trench or a bunch of porch-monkeys protesting the death of one of their own, because once somebody’s dead you can’t harm that person anymore. You can’t make him suffer endlessly, paying again and again and again for the crimes he committed.
The ability to torture lives in every one of us. The ability to dehumanize the “bad guys” is always there. It matters not one iota whether torture works or not, because we don’t do it for those reasons. We do it to take out our frustrations and hatreds on those who’ve wronged us. It’s…not exactly cathartic, because the willingness to torture doesn’t do anything more than beget an even greater appetite for torture. But it’s something that exists buried in our genes (sheer animal aggression is certainly a part of it) and, more importantly, buried in our cultures–ALL of our cultures.
There is not a single human civilization or society that has NOT applied torture to their perceived enemies. And there never will be…until we rewrite certain hormonal effects in our midbrains or train our children to be ruthlessly logical at all times. The only way torture will end is when “being human” ends. And the sooner the damn better.
Yes, but my point about Ebola medicine still stands. If we are taking about a difference in the chance of a thing working (or a difference in the incidence of it having work) we can’t say that if X is 4 times as effective as Y, and X is effective, then Y must be effective. It could be that X has four times the success rate of Y, and that puts Y into the worse-than-nothing category.
But we aren’t talking about laws, we are talking about what is right - that is, we are talking about what should be law. My example of a death penalty that isn’t effective for recidivism is clearly absurd, but if it turned out that the angry spirits of murdered people were just about as likely to kill again as the people themselves if left alive, I think that would probably be the nail in the coffin for the death penalty as a good idea, and anyone who was advocating it would clearly just be putting bloody-minded revenge ahead of all other considerations.
Well, except that, as this study shows, rapport-based techniques got information sooner as well as more reliably. So if you don’t have time, then it’s torture you don’t have time for. But oh well, people who support torture plainly don’t like facts about torture. This is why it matters that torture is ineffective. To counter nonsense arguments like this one.
You’ve gotta love an article where, on many pages, the footnotes take up more column inches than the text.
Yep. The reason is that it’s a tightly argued piece, that goes to great lengths to cover the spectrum, and simultaneously close off potential responses and worm arounds.
“yes but [x]”
“Oh, [x] is covered and refuted in footnote 39 on p.2”
This article jumps to the conclusion that those who tortured were sadists, when it is just as plausible to conclude that, like many in the Bush administration, they were simply pig-headed idiots who refused to believe studies from “ivory tower” academics. These people would probably tell you that “everyone knows” the “common sense” that torture is effective.
I think true evil is far rarer in our political/ideological opponents than many want to argue. Stupidity is a much more plausible explanation.
You must like reading Law Reviews…
I was going to recommend Infinite Jest and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell.
