POLL: Torture effectiveness to gain reliable info.

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A simple poll- here is the premise.

Since the dawn of time, since man first crawled out of the swamps he has from time to time over the centuries used torture on his fellow man in an attempt to gain information. No doubt there have been other reasons that torture has been used but in this instance we are only concerned with the use of torture to gain reliable information.

The poll "question" is actually a statement- the answers should reflect whether you see the statement as obvioulsy either true or false or impossible to judge as either.

Poll Information
This poll contains 1 question(s). 35 user(s) have voted.
You may not view the results of this poll without voting.

Poll Results: Torture effectiveness to gain reliable info. (35 votes.)

Torture has NEVER been effective in gaining reliable information. (Choose 1)
* obviously true - 20% (7)
* obviously false - 51% (18)
* impossible to know - 29% (10)

 

It's obviously false. However you slice it, physical pain makes ANYONE more likely to divulge information.
There are obviously more humane ways, but very few more effective.

Torture has no place in the modern world though, obviously.

 

Actually the question is not so much whether any information is gathered but whether or not any RELIABLE information has EVER been gathered by torture since the dawn of man.

I think the answer quite obvious myself but will hold my opinion back for a couple days so as not to overly influence the poll...

 

Its obviously false. Like Barmy Army said, torture makes anyone more likely to divulge information. This does not guarentee reliable or even true information, but at some point, someone gave their torturer reliable information just to make the torture stop. I mean, I'm sure there have been a lot of instances where the person being tortured has given false information to the torturer, but I'm sure there have also been a lot of people who were not strong enough to risk that, and just gave in, hoping for some kind of mercy.

 

The way it's worded, it absolutely has to be false; ALWAYS and NEVER are almost always false statements. The fact that this statement is false, however, has little to do with whether or not torture should be used (just to make it clear). Rather, I would think a percentage, graphed opposite the importance of the information to both torturer and torturee, might show the case better.

I think torture is incredibly reliable in gaining non-crucial information, and moderately reliable in gaining important information. Though the likeliness of gaining important information has to be weighed against the possibility of counter-intelligence, whether deliberate (a lie), source-based (somebody told the wrong thing to the guy you're interrogating), or simply to stop the pain. Basically, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't; use it, but be ready to be punished if it doesn't work perfectly, even if it wasn't your fault.

 

Only one piece of important information needs to have been gathered reliably under torture for that statement to be obviously false.

 

Sorry but it's a bad poll question. You might as well ask "Is Washington DC the government capital of the USA?". Tortue works, it's not nice but often the most effective ways of solving a problem aren't nice.

How often is information reliable? Well often after somebody has been tortured they would be often kept 'off hand' while people investigate whether the information was true or not. If it is true they might be in for a ANOTHER torture session to get more information out of them or if they lied they'll probably be tortured as a form of punishment. Frankly the best thing for any torture victim to do would be to give false information, when all hopes of escape and salvation are absent the mind should turn to vengence. If you can provide false information on your troop movements and put the enemy at a disadvantage, well, you've stopped the torture AND harmed your enemy.

 

its obviously true, there is nothing effective about it, it is slow, risky and costly and then spending the resources to check said whether said information gathered is true adds more to the burden of using it. if you think world leaders stopped the mass use of torture for humane reasons youve got another thing coming.

 

Yes I agree its a bad poll question and I also agree that the premise is ludicrous in the extreme.

I am amazed that anyone could possibly even consider the idea that since the dawn of time not a single solitary instance when torture was used provided any reliable information.

I also apologize for the bad poll question and for "using" this forum (and the good folks who come here) in an attempt to prove something to an individual on another forum or at least to gather some evidence that indicates that only a small minority of those responding see the premise as Obviously true...

All that said I would like to say that while I find the idea of torture NEVER resulting in reliable information to be ludicrous I do in fact think it may be just as likely to produce misinformation as it is to produce good information but that the results depend on entirely too many variables to be predicted on anything but a case by case basis.

I do believe there may be times when toture might even be worth the effort to attempt but I think they would and should be extremely rare and no matter the "justification" there may well always be questions of whether it was necessary or not.

I also think that we may go too far in defining what should be legitimate interrogation techniques as "torture" and that the coddling of prisoners in general should be minimized. I think prisoners should be treated humanely but not housed at Club Med and offered a facial and pedicure weekly...

 

Exactly. And since you only need to have ONE instance where this occurred to make the statement false, it quite obviously has to be false.

 

I have a feeling the obviously true votes were essentially protest votes. I mean, my inclination was to hit obviously true, because whenever I see such blatantly weighted polls, my knee-jerk reaction is to go against the grain.

I ended up not voting at all, granted, but if I had...

 

You make it sound like an ideological statement instead of a factual one. You can't decide if something has been effective or not just on the ideological level. You can judge if it's good or not or if it's worth the cost payed. But avoid the danger of blurring facts with ideology and ruling that something was or was not out of ideological premises that exist in your mind and are not historical or scientific facts.

In casu, torture is awful and the reliability is questionable since most people will admit to anything you want if you work on them long enough, but in skillful hands, torture could actually be quite effective. But we are opposed to torture not because it's (supposedly) ineffective but because it's inhuman. And if we oppose something basing on a moral high ground, we shouldn't really try to wrap it in cotton wools and dilute it and water down to utilitarian concerns as if we were ashamed of the moral motives that drive us and trying to disguise them.

 

it doesnt produce reliable information, noone would ever rely on information gathered in this method while developing a strategy.

 

To further explain why the poll was posted as it was let me briefly explain.

In a discussion of the prevalence of torture in US military OPS on a another board a statement that inferred that torture had NEVER yeilded any reliable information was tossed into the fray.

Until that time I had not even entered the discussion but did so at that point only to note that such obvious overstatements were ridiculous and why even bother to utter them in a reasonable discussion. To make a long and mostly boring story short - he disagreed and thats what led to the poll here being posted as it was with the intention of showing that when reasonable people congregate statements of pure rhetoric like this are usually quickly discerned as being just that.

I do happen to think that for the most part the "obviously true" choices were indeed "objectors" and probably do not indicate any real belief that not one single case of torture ever led to the disclosure of reliable information since the dawn of time...but then again I am somewhat biased...

Just FYI the total results over 3 boards were: (3/14/7) here and (2/7/5) at Tarnas and (3/8/6) at Ironworks. for a total at this point of

obviously true 8
obvioulsly false 27
impossible to know 18

(after removing 2 of my 3 votes - I have no idea if anyone else voted in more than one poll)

The other polls can be found here:
Tarnas

Ironworks

and the original shouting match errr thread is here:

Tarnas prevelence of torture in US Military ops

Again I apologize for "using" these forums in this way simply to make a point in another one altho it seems to have resulted in reasonable discussion here so perhaps no harm was done...

 

You miss my point. In my experience, blatantly weighted polls such as this tend to be conducted solely to achieve an ideological end. i.e., one would look at the poll results here, where most people say "well, yes, torture has extracted reliable info at least once," and then say to others who haven't seen the poll, "Most people on an international message board believe torture is an effective means of extracting information."

The reason these sorts of polls are usually put together is to provide support for disinformation. So, yes, I do view it as ideological, I suppose.

 

If you torture someone enough, they'll tell you anything, but that doesn't necessarily make it so. Hell, if I was being tortured for something I didn't know, i'd just make something up. Wouldn't you?

 

Yeah, it's not really 'reliable' info - it might turn out to be true, but calling it 'reliable' might be going a bit far...

Regardless, I'm not voting, becauce your poll sucks.

 

There's bit of a one-sided question, I am afraid... Saying that torture NEVER yielded reliable information is like saying that there never was a rain of fish. There may be and iirc probably was, but I personally wouldn't heat up the oil whenever I see rainclouds.
And chances are, if I had to choose between the two occurences, torture making someone tell the truth would happen more often. Of course, if they continued, he might tell a lot of other things as well. Torture MAY yield the correct information, and that is that. It may also obscure it, however.

However, I can say one thing: that torture is something that should belong in the past, at least for any nation wanting to speak of "civilizedness" and claim a position of morality on any issue.