Blog against torture day

[nancylebov]

Torture doesn't work to get accurate information.

It's a reliable way to get inaccurate information into your idea of what's going on.

It gives people a good reason to hate you. Even if you think they already hate you for bad reasons, adding good reasons will make things worse.

Torture means people aren't going to want to surrender to you.

It's evil. I don't know whether evil is a separate feature on top of spreading misery while doing something that undercuts anything legitimate you're trying to accomplish, but it might be.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

I'm no expert on the subject, but I suspect that torture is effective at getting information when the torturer has a way of verifying what the victim says and punishes inaccurate information. I'd expect it to be useless when the victim has a reasonable chance of not being caught at a lie, though random punishment might be used to create the appearance of knowledge. I'm really not convinced by the conventional knowledge that torture is in general an ineffective way to get information, and a moral argument based on that assumption is inadequate.

One of the worst things about torture is that it becomes attractive even when there's no reason for it. The torture at Abu Ghraib may have started with the worst of the lot for seemingly good reasons, but soon it became routine. As the Milgram experiments show, there's something built into people that makes most willing to do horrible things once an authority figure says they're OK.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

It's not that torture never gives you reliable information, it's that the odds of getting inaccurate information are very high.

Let's consider your scenario--it requires that you have someone who actually knows what you're hoping to find out, that your torture hasn't disoriented them to the point where they can't keep the truth straight, that they trust that you'll only torture them further if what they say doesn't pan out, and that they aren't so angry and stubborn that they'll give you a false answer anyway. And that you'll recognize the truth when you hear it.

My impression is that a lot of the information gained from torture is hard to verify independently. It seems to mostly go after names of people, who are then tortured for more names.

[haircaspian.livejournal.com]

I just finished reading Ken Macleod's _The Execution Channel_. It's the first work of fiction I've seen where torture pushes someone into giving inaccurate information.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Good for MacLeod. Does the inaccurate information have consequences?

[haircaspian.livejournal.com]

I don't think so, but it's right near the end of the book and there's not that much more about the torturer.

[thette.livejournal.com]

I've read a couple of historical novels from the witch hunts, where that featured strongly. Think they were all Swedish, though.

[madfilkentist]

There have been plenty of movies and stories in English in which people have confessed under torture to being witches and made up detailed corroborating fictions.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That's the easy stuff, though. It's tougher for writers to present mundane investigations such as are considered normal going that far wrong.

[demonspawnmom.livejournal.com]

There is no way I could have said what you did; I had to copy this and post to my own livejournal. I hope I gave you the proper credit for this. If not, please let me know.

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

Thanks very much for the quote, the credit, and letting me know.

[kgbooklog.livejournal.com]

Is "inaccurate" a verb, or is something missing from the second statement?

[nancylebov.livejournal.com]

That sentence no verb until I corrected it.

"Inaccurate" isn't a verb, or at least not yet.