Does torture work well as an interrogation technique?

It can. It can also be worse than useless.

I went to the Tower of London the other day

surprised to see how little torture us brits have done

>Does torture work well as an interrogation technique?
>No, torture only produces confessions (or whatever the tortured person thinks the torturer wants to hear), but it is a bad way to obtain factual information from someone.
/thread

see

>Veeky Forums - history & humanities

you literally starved boers in concentration camps

^this

except it doesn't extract real information

people say whatever they can imagine to make the torture stop

It was never used to extract information. It was used to extract confessions, regardless of truth.

Your personal failure as a human being does little to prove a practice employed tens of millions of time.
One, its anecdotal.
Two, you didn't torture her.
Three, we don't know if she did steal money, or if she just said whatever so you stop beating her.
Four, we don't know if that story ever happened.
Six, a single drop of water in an ocean, your single experiment does nothing to combat the trend.
Seven, she was your girlfriend and trusted you, the braking of trust and shock and other such emotional stress probably would have influenced her more than your slaps.
Eight, you not realize I skipped five.
Nine, kill yourself.
Ten, the game.

If done correctly it works very well but its very easy to just get the victim to tell you what you want to hear rather than the truth

This is the most cringeworthy post on Veeky Forums and that's saying something

Yes, because in all those years none of the information extracted from torture was incorrect.

It's not that simple. It's about fucking with the captives head, with implied torture awaiting them. With the goal of extracting legitimate information. Torture can come into play, but it's mostly a mind game.

And then there's this shit:

youtube.com/watch?v=TRC6FwjPZS4

No, this one is

Nah the long triggered post with an outdated infantile the game ending is genuine cringe.

This isn't entirely true, it all depends on the type of torture and the information being looked for.

For example, waterboarding someone until they tell you where the bomb is may not be the best way to locate it, but giving somebody a purple-nurple until they tell you where they hid your car keys can be very effective.

the information you get will be as good as the extraction method (not very)

>surprised to see how little torture us brits have done
Maybe not in terms of racks and hot pokers and all that stuff, but we engineered a few famines here and there.

Dont belive the milksops here saying it never works because they think if you torture someone they just say what you want to hear, that shits done by amatures.

More a less thisIve found pschological torture is most effective in my work (warden) but sometimes a mark is nothing but a blank slate in there head, because they learned how to block it or are so dumb there two dimentional minds can handle complex psy-torture.

best method is a mix of both. punch with one hand then offer the other in friendship.

Ah, but you know those CIA boys, its getting better all the time...

You are a moron. Even if if has 90% change to lead to a false confession, that already makes it unreliable, and it might as well be 0% accurate.

Torturing someone for a confession only makes sense if 100% of torture results in a true confession, and doesn't make sense if there is a risk of a false one.

This is what torture gets you

Jesus christ is this Reddit?

Yes, torture works.

If buffalo bill tied you to a chair and threatened to break toes until you gave him your password you would give it to him, if not immediately then when the vice starts tightening. The "they will tell you anything to make the pain stop" meme is true and has to be taken into account, however it does not completely invalidate torture as an effective interrogation technique.

Even if you can't immediately test the information given there is a chance the information might be reliable which can help reduce the cost of information gathering. For example if you doubt much of what an interogee said and there are no other leads you can still investigate all the names they have given and cross-examine what other conspirators are saying until you hone in on better evidence.

All that aside... The interrogator might not be reliable or competent, particularly when exposed to the trauma of torturing someone. So as a general policy torture should be dissuaded in favor of trying to "turn" captives which seemed to be more effective in ww2 and the cold war.

Christ ...

It lets you find a rabbit quickly?

If what you want is to convict someone, yes.

Yes those tens of thousands of women were actually witches and had sex with Satan every full moon.

Great post m8! No joke!

Torture is utilized to gain two different things, confessions and new information. It's pretty bad as a prosecution method but it's fucking fantastic for gathering intel.

Only way to find out would be to conduct a study. Good luck getting approval from your ethical committee.

first off theres no need to bring in your opinion on my intelligence, I could shit-fling too but it just brings the conversation down.

Secondly, at no point did i say i torture for confessions, I get infomation on whats going on in this prison and i take pride in my work. Its a grisly job for some but I help a hell of a lot more prisoners than i hurt.

Im not looking for locations, im looking to stop someone getting shanked or the next riot.

TLDR: I get Infomation, because they have nothing they need to confess to, i already know there crimes.

It certainly can. Saying "tell me everything you know about ____" is ineffective, but if you have specific information you're looking for and can verify, like "where is your boss's hideout?" Then torture can certainly work. There's a reason that they keep using it.

I keep hearing this but that just makes me think it must be extremely effective at getting information you can verify is correct.

>make up bullshit to stop the torture
>torturers find out it's bullshit
>now get tortured to death
Genius plan

>tell the truth
>still get executed because otherwise you'd say you were tortured

That's the threat not the torture

If it's war no one's gonna give a shit they were tortured c'mon.

If it's not you just threaten him, plus there's a lot of tortures that don't leave marks on the body.

Not to mention at least by telling the truth you're either set free or at least given a clean death, instead of certain horrible death

You are rationalizing here, rather than reasoning.

>Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse. But that’s only the past.

>In addition, torture and abuse has made us less safe because detainees are less likely to cooperate during interrogations if they don’t trust us. I know from having conducted hundreds of interrogations of high ranking Al Qaida members and supervising more than one thousand, that when a captured Al Qaida member sees us live up to our stated principles they are more willing to negotiate and cooperate with us. When we torture or abuse them, it hardens their resolve and reaffirms why they picked up arms.
Former officials who say that we prevented terrorist attacks by waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah are possibly intentionally ignorant of the fact that their actions cost us American lives. And let’s not forget the glaring failure in these cases. Torture never convinced either of these men to sell out Osama Bin Laden. And that’s the other lesson I learned in Iraq

>Coercion convinces a detainee to give you the minimum (and often an altered minimum) amount of information. Note that KSM only provided information that was downward from him in the Al Qaida hierarchy. I saw the same results in Iraq. When other interrogators used fear and control to force detainees to provide information, that information, at best, was always downward or lateral in direction. Why? Because a detainee knows that they can sell out the people below them or even future operations and the organization will survive.

>Contrast that with my interrogation team in Iraq. We used relationship-building approaches, leveraged the best of our American culture (tolerance, cultural understanding, and intellect), and we ultimately found the head of Al Qaida in Iraq by being smarter, not harsher. We captured Al Qaida terrorists, some very high-ranking leaders, who never provided information. But we didn’t resort to torture or abuse because we knew that it would have made us hypocrites to sell out the very principles that we were defending. We also knew that it would cost us the lives of our brothers and sisters in arms, our fellow soldiers. Instead, we used those as opportunities to become better interrogators and then concentrated on other avenues to achieve our mission. We can lose a battle and still win a war.

>My extensive experience demonstrates that we can effectively interrogate without using torture and abuse. We do not have to choose between terror and torture. We are Americans and we are smarter and better than that.

>>Matthew Alexander is a pseudonym for a 14 year veteran of the U.S. Air Force. As the leader of an elite interrogations team in Iraq, he conducted more than 300 interrogations and supervised more than 1,000. He served in three wars and was awarded the Bronze Star Medal in 2006.

thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/04/20/torture-doesnt-work.html

No, I'm telling you why lying under torture is the stupidest thing you can possibly do, hence if the victim has two working brain cells he'll tell the truth

No, you are telling me why being under torture is bad. From this follows that lying under torture is bad, just like every single other thing you do under torture, because just being under torture is already bad.

You lie? Moment of relief, maybe more torture later. You die for sure.
You tell the truth? Moment of relief, maybe more torture later. You die for sure.

And saying that someone tortured might be released because he wouldn't have scars, laughable. Most countries are democracies, and in all countries public knowledge of torture will cause harm and can overturn regimes and ruin careers. If you are getting tortured, you are fucked either way, and people worth torturing probably are idealists or otherwise trained to keep their mouth shut, and will know that they are getting killed either way, might as well not betray the cause.
They don't call it "breaking" when you squeal for no reason, squealing and telling the truth is not a rational decision, it is being broken, it is getting fucked up so bad you can't help it. Nobody reasons that telling the truth will end the torture and set you free, people only do it when their limits are reached. And until that point they can talk all lotta nonsense, much of which you have no way of detecting if its true or not. In fact they may even think they are telling the truth when they aren't. Torture gives you a seemingly random result, some truth, some lie, with no way to tell them apart unless you already knew, making it useless information.

Torturing is retarded, as is rationalizing a result you want in advance, walking backwards to produce logic leading to it, rather than reasoning and seeing what result you get.

>You tell the truth? Moment of relief, maybe more torture later. You die for sure.
You know this because...?

I don't remember executions at Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo. Your life is far safer if you tell the truth than to lie

>Your life
You keep using that phrase. Is it so hard for you to understand that there are things people value more than their own lives?

>the government never told me they killed people after they torture them

Hmmm, really makes you think.

is this thread /RP/ now?

>There's a reason that they keep using it.
Because inflicting pain on a guy you don't like is a hell of a way to release some pent up anger.

As the Stirnerfags would say, S P O O K S
>the government was able to hide executions after an army of human rights groups descended on them

Really made me think

wat

Also pretty useful in acquiring scapegoats.

Are you saying those particular women were not really witches for some reason or that witches don't exist? Because Bible is clear on the fact that witchcraft is a real thing. The only problem with shit like Salem trials was that they didn't fully observe Mosaic laws and didn't require two independent witnesses as commanded by Deuteronomy 19:15.

>Eight, you not realize I skipped five.

You get them to confess where they think things are.
That isn't worth anything.

Or what you tell them to do.

Its complete worthless. Unless your goal is for them to sign their own execution

>there's a reason they keep using it
>US banana republic government can't bring up a single case of it working time after time
lovin'
every
laff
Meight

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff