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I don't know if I'd be considered an expert or anything, but I've long had a pet theory/argument regarding torture. It seems intuitively strange how so many people seem to have enthusiasm for it despite the enthusiasm in other circles for declaring that it "doesn't work". I think this can be resolved by my statement that torture works really great at what it's actually for - suppressing dissent in an authoritarian regime.
Some may say that it doesn't work very well for actually investigating dissident movements. But working well at that was never a factor. If you grab and torture some poor fellow and he gives you 3 random names out of desperation, and you do nasty things to them too, that's a feature, not a bug. Justice was never the goal, terror is. You've successfully terrorized 4 people, and anyone else who can see what happened to them, out of having anything to do with opposing the regime, whether or not they wanted to in the first place. And you've also made it so the security forces can never defect from the regime, either individually or en masse, as too many people hate their guts.
I guess it's a question of definitions. Torture as punishment and deterrent works, unquestionably, but I wouldn't call it that, rather "corporal punishment" or something like that.
But the debate isn't so much about that (because as such it is trivially against the moral principles the United States stand for) but about it as a means of extracting information. And at that it really sucks.
Though it works more than you might expect (we have credible reports of various historical factions getting information they deemed useful at nontrivial rates) the false positive rate is so high that the information you get is practically unusable and use of torture actually lowers the quality of information you could even get out of someone because pain and disorientation hurt the ability to recall at a neurological level. And the inaccuracy grows the more torture you apply too.
Compound that with the availability of another method that doesn't fuck with the wits of the prisoners in the form of threats to hostages, and torture is objectively a terrible means of intelligence that's only really useful if you don't care about accuracy and just wish to implicate as many people as possible.
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I agree with this. Torture for getting information is a poor tool, because you're never sure if you've squeezed every drop of information out of the guy no matter how much you've done to him (maybe he's holding back that one tiny but vital scrap of information), and then you get to the point where he really is just naming names and agreeing to whatever you say in order to get you to stop.
Torture as "we're the new masters in town, we can and will do whatever the fuck we want to you and there's nothing you can do about it so bow down" is effective, on the other hand. Is Guantanamo Bay actually providing any useful information any more, or is it just about revenge and 'we can do what the fuck we want'?
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