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This question is similar to asking: If you get cancer, will you beat it?
How would you know? Unless you've been tortured before (reading some posts on this forum don't count), how would you know how you'll react? You could think you're the toughest SOB on the planet, but when the time comes you may pee your pants and talk like a bird.
The nature of torture has remained the same since the dawn of history. The torture stops when you tell them what they want to hear. The truth is not a factor.
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Originally Posted by LeftCoastee
You could think you're the toughest SOB on the planet, but when the time comes you may pee your pants and talk like a bird.
And that is why torture really serves no purpose outside of sadistic satisfaction. It's unreliable. Torture nowadays makes just as much sense as it did in the Spanish inquisition. None.
I am dismayed that the word "torture" has been so watered down. If you have the stomach for it, do some research and find out what real torture is. Real torture does not consist of flushing the pages of a book down the toilet. Calling that torture is like using the word rape to describe breathing heavy on the phone, or pathological for a guy who removes the pickle from his burger.
Certain words have the potential to carry a lot of weight, and they cease to do so when whimsically applied to relatively harmless gestures.
And that is why torture really serves no purpose outside of sadistic satisfaction. It's unreliable. Torture nowadays makes just as much sense as it did in the Spanish inquisition. None.
I'm not sure I fully agree.
I'm no fan of torture, and am not in any way advocating it.
However, even if 10% or 20% of the information gained is accurate, does that not maybe make the interrogation worthwhile?
I'm no fan of torture, and am not in any way advocating it.
However, even if 10% or 20% of the information gained is accurate, does that not maybe make the interrogation worthwhile?
I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud.
If ten percent of information given up is true, how do you know which ten percent? How much time and energy do you use before you discover the other 90 percent is made up, and even if the other is true, it may be old news back home.
The purpose of physical torture has always been to get the answer you *want*. In the inquisition, they wanted to hear the victum was guilty. Eventually a quicker death became worth the lie. That's how the system worked. And it was an instrument of fear. How many people, placed where they could see their fate, including some of the more hidious (and fatal) devices that exist just confessed anyway?
Psychological torture was used by the KBG and other intelligence agencies where *real* information was needed. Its not about inflicting pain or fear of death, but inducing such confusion that the victum willingly gives information. Often they are never touched. But it plays with the mind. This includes sleep deprovation. But even then, past a certain point, the mind embrases fantasy and whats said is up in the air.
Dictatorships often use torture as a means of passing on a message. Those arrested for "social" crimes face terrible treatment because they are intended to survive and go back out into society as examples. Even with the POWs, just how much information could they give after enough time had gone by? Their treatment was I suspect not for information but as a pure exercise in power.
Rephrasing the origional question a bit, what if there is no information to give? I've read where the exit is either death or information unless the goal is simply power.
A few years ago there was a site about the history of torture and some of the stuff there is sicker than anything we hear about today. But just because its been "simplified" its still the same beast.
Several years ago, the US was accused of "torturing" prisoners by tearing pages out of the Koran in front of them and flushing them down the toilet. I think I could stand up for quite a while under that kind of torture. I could stand it even longer if they were doing it to Bible, and I'd offer to help.
I have not had very many personal experiences with people who have been tortured. However, I have had one. A close friend told me he was riding his bicycle through some African country, Cameroun, I think, and he stopped to take a picture of the scenery in a river, from a bridge. It turns out that in Cameroun, and a lot of countries with paranoid security issues, it is illegal to photograph lots of things of national security import, including bridges. He was seen, and arrested, and they tried to get him to confess to miscellaneous charges, and stuck pins under his fingernails to get him to sign all sorts of things and name names. When he got back to Belgium, he reported the fact to his government, and they took the issue to the African country, and got a substantial cash settlement (some thousands of dollars) for the traveler. I didn't ask him what it felt like to have pins pushed up under your fingernails.
Years after the Vietnam war, I was chatting with a traveler who had a good business in Florida, and the subject switched to his Vietnam experience. He was in some kind of intelligence, and was responsible for interrogating Vietnamese captives. One of us started in on a "Did you ever . . " line of questioning, and named some pretty horrendous manhood specifics. The guy looked off into space for a moment and quietly said "You do what you have to do".
If ten percent of information given up is true, how do you know which ten percent? How much time and energy do you use before you discover the other 90 percent is made up, and even if the other is true, it may be old news back home.
I can't answer that question, as you can't. And to me, that's part of the problem with this whole scenario.
Part of me would rather be right only 10% of the time than ignore everything. But we can also become so busy pursuing the false 90% that we miss the 10% anyway.
We have another motivation for torture also: deterrent. This was usually a situation where the condemned was put to death in a very brutal, torturous way (hung, drawn and quartered; burned at the stake; impaled; etc) rather than just tortured, so that the general populous had an ‘example’ of what they could look forward to for a similar infraction against the state. In this case, it tended not to matter what the ‘torturee’ said--perhaps saving him/her a few extra minutes of agony if anything at all. The more brutal the method the ‘better’ for the state. And unfortunately, I’d assume in this capacity, torture was a far more effective tool than it is to gain information.
And, yes, I agree that some of the ‘torture’ we refer to, such as tearing a book up and flushing it down the toilet or having heavy metal music piped into the holding cell, pales compared to true torture. Now... if it were Barry Manilow music, perhaps you’d have a better case in calling that torture. KIDDING! Seriously, as was mentioned, look up some of the torture techniques and devices from the Middle Ages. Downright horrifying.
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Seriously, as was mentioned, look up some of the torture techniques and devices from the Middle Ages. Downright horrifying.
