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Posted 2008-03-04, 11:57 AM
in reply to Adrenachrome's post starting "Ok, sure, what is your point. What..."
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You may have seen the WIRED interview with Psychologist Philip Zimbardo and the mind-numbing pictures of torture linked there. A recent New Scientist interview of Darius Rejali is a necessary read on how torture deeply breaks both the sufferer and the torturer. Part of the NS interview:
Quote:
Why is torture so hard to control?
Usually the top authorises it and the bottom delivers. Then it's a slippery slope as torturers quickly become less responsive to centralised authority. One reason is competition between interrogators. When policemen track down information, they cooperate. In torture it's different. The guy who breaks the prisoner gets the reward. If you were the guy softening him up, would you hand him over for the next guy to get all the glory? Torturers adopt new techniques and become more vicious in the hope they can break their prisoner.
Torturers also suffer traumatic stress themselves. It screws everybody up and it takes a long time to undo that damage. I fear the US is well on that path.
Is there such a thing as a science of torture?
If there were, then torture should be producing accurate information regularly. Each interrogator would know exactly how much pain to apply to get a person to break. But pain cannot be measured in the way people think. Typically interrogators know two things about pain. The first is that people have different sensitivities to different kinds of pain, and it is unpredictable which kind they are more sensitive to. The second is that over time a person becomes desensitised to pain. Sooner or later they don't feel anything. So torturers take a scatter-shot approach, try a wide variety of techniques, then ratchet it up as fast and early as they can, hoping to overtake the pain threshold of their victim. You wouldn't have to do that if there were a science of torture.
How often do interrogators obtain useful information or truthful confessions using torture?
The few statistical studies on this suggest the return is incredibly poor. There are several reasons. How do you know you have the right person? And even if you do, how do you know they're telling the truth? Third, torture can damage the brain, and anything that affects the brain's capacity to withhold information also affects its capacity to retrieve it.
If it doesn't work, why does it persist?
Myths and rumours. There is a perception that democracy makes us weak and only "real men" know how to do this stuff. People think torture worked for the Gestapo, for example. It didn't. What made the Gestapo so scarily efficient was its dependence on public cooperation. Informers betrayed the resistance repeatedly in Europe, and everyone knew this, but it was more convenient to say the Gestapo got the truth by beating it out of us. Public cooperation is the best way to gather information. After the failed bomb attacks in London in 2005, the British police found every one of the gang within a week. One was caught after his parents turned him in. They would not have done that if they'd thought he'd be tortured.
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