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About 4 years ago I went to a talk given by the author of the book, the subject was along the same lines as the book: how torture is ineffective because it dam

by rjtobin 11y ago

About 4 years ago I went to a talk given by the author of the book, the subject was along the same lines as the book: how torture is ineffective because it damages the subject's ability to recall information. Afterwards someone asked a question that a lot of us had been thinking: that in a lot of situations where torture might be used, the information being asked for is very well known to the subject, so unless serious brain damage occurred, the subject wasn't going to forget after torture. Like, "who is your cell leader?" or "where are the guns hidden?". He seemed confused by the question, even after a few other audience members tried to rephrase it. Got the impression he was being intentionally obtuse. I guess it deflated the gist of his work, which more accurately should be something like "torture ineffective when the concealed information is hard to remember". I haven't read the book, but I hope in the meantime he has worked a little to address this question. Seemed like a well meaning guy though, and maybe my memory of the talk has been eroded by the torturous years of grad school in between

angelbob 11y ago
It's not clear that torture makes it especially likely to prevent lying about information, though. It'd be nice if he studied that instead of making us assume it, though :-P
dror 11y ago
Here's the reason that it doesn't work. Imagine that your village has a 1000 people and someone is torturing you to find out "who is your cell leader." At first you are resisting, and so you name random people in the village. After you've named 50 people or more, you break and name the real person. The torturers though don't know that this is the real person, so they'll keep torturing you, and you'll just go through every name in the village to make the torture stop. How can they separate the real person from the ones you lied about either out of resistance or to make the pain go away? In some cases this could work. They want to find out where you hid the guns, and every time, they go and dig till you break and give them the right place, and then they do find the guns.
- rjtobin 11y ago
  What you've said sounds like a reasonable argument why torture doesn't work in that case. My point wasn't that torture does work (I have no idea about that), just that the research outlined by O'Mara doesn't address situations like this (and so the research isn't enough to prove that "torture is ineffective" as is suggested).
- cm2187 11y ago
  Usually you ask for verifyable information. CIA officers do not need to be reminded what a lie is.
  - e12e 11y ago
    I think the comments of the FBI revealed wrt. the CIA torture programs shows that CIA officers a) don't know how to interrogate people, and b) do need to be reminded what a lie is. I agree that if what you want is some concrete information that the subject is reluctant to give up ("Where have you buried the guns I need in order to kill the rest of your family?") -- you could probably get at that via torture. I don't know if that would typically be the fastest or most reliable way to get that information (Consider, eg: Staging an escape, allowing the subject, helped by an under-cover agent, point you to said guns). I think people get hung up on the "bomb plot theory" too much. My impression is that while such simple cases make for great TV, that's not the kind of real-world questions intelligence organizations really are concerned with. So if we say: "ok, use torture to save the children!" -- if that was taken at face value -- it means: "Disband most (all?) large-scale operations that allow torture today, such as the CIA programs." I also think there's a bit of a hang-up on "effectiveness". If you're fighting an illegal war, kidnapping and killing people that are clearly innocent -- it's hard to accept an argument from "effectiveness". At least if there's no indication that atrocities would stop if you "won".
SCAQTony 11y ago
Taking it from a more political point of view rather than neurological, Shakespeare did a political play on this subject which was summarily all about blow-back or stone cold revenge — "Titus Andronicus." (A movie by Julie Taymor of the play "Titus" is quite powerful) In politics and war The dirtiest fighter makes the rules and now that the United States tortures people, I suspect we will be "one-upped" in the next war.
- marklgr 11y ago
  Indeed, once you resort to torture or other "questionable" means, you can't accuse or deny enemies from using them too; this sets new standards. The argument is generally "but they already do it", and in my opinion it fails to recognize 1) the large scale validation for every belligerent, 2) the race to "no-rule" warfare, as limits are one-upped once (de facto) accepted. So it's not because _some_ belligerents are willing to use banned means that everybody should start using them too.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  Yes, many of my worries about what my government get up to are based on the fact that they lose all moral standing when others do the same, see Russia bombing Syria for a recent example.
XorNot 11y ago
I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing. So they don't have a particular strong desire to conceal information from anyone who threatens them. This means, in an actual scenario of torture interrogation, you're pretty likely to initially withhold whatever you can. But by the time you reach an actual breaking point...well it's called that for a reason. You are in fact very unlikely to remember much of anything because of pain, shock etc. You're pretty likely to say whatever the torturer is asking to hear. Waterboarding is torture because once water gets into your oesophagus your rational mind shuts down completely - this post (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=448717 http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=448717) pretty much summarizes it and the experience has been confirmed by everyone else who has had it done to them. That's the point about torture being ineffective. By the time it's effective, you're dealing with someone who is pretty much going to confabulate whatever you want to hear.
- varjag 11y ago
  > I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing. It almost sounds as if you are trying to define away torture for a fringe case where it's guaranteed to be useless. This is a legalistic approach not anymore convincing than attempts to define waterboarding as "not torture". Torture is used in the armed conflicts depressingly regularly: the corresponding clauses in Geneva Conventions for treatment of POW were added not for purely theoretic reasons. Torture is used by criminals around the world on daily basis. The reason they haven't given up after millenia of practice is that it tends to work in their unsophisticated, easily verifiable cases: getting the combination to a safe or finding where a merchant keeps their money stashed. Anyway, torture should not be used because it's simply an abhorrent thing to do to a human being. Trying to frame it in terms of performance is damaging to the moral aspect of it, as you descend to the same inhuman cost/benefit mindset as torture proponent.
  - 11y ago
x5n1 11y ago
Most of the people the US was holding at gitmo and other black sites around the world were simply people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. But you never know that for sure. It's unconscionable that random innocents be tortured for they may yield some information. But allowing torture by using extreme cases like your's, in reality it is almost never that cut and dry.
bsder 11y ago
> so unless serious brain damage occurred, the subject wasn't going to forget after torture. Really? You have data on this? I'd love to see it. However, there are multiple problems with your scenario. The biggest being: what happens if the individual DOESN'T KNOW? He's going to tell you anything he can to get you to stop, and, if you could verify the crucial piece of information, you wouldn't be torturing him in the first place. So, even if I concede that torture works when you know you have the right person (and I do not), the problem is that you can't distinguish whether you have the right person and whether he actually knows the information you want.
- bluecalm 11y ago
  >>if you could verify the crucial piece of information, you wouldn't be torturing him in the first place. This is not true. There are many things easy to verify but difficult to discover. For example a place the money is kept in a big house.
  - SilasX 11y ago
    Yeah, I always hoped HN was the last place where you actually had to convince people that NP-complete problems exist...
    - PepeGomez 11y ago
      Real world problems are often NP-hard, not NP-complete.
  - saganus 11y ago
    Well yes. But I think the parent was framing it with reference to the intelligence world conflicts. At least that's how I Read it. Imagine you torture a guy to get the name of it's cell leader. You can't verify this easily. You have to capture that other guy, torture him and repeat the process. While in any of those steps you have the chance of getting false information without knowing it. I would think most intelligence from a war zone would be of this type, i.e. hard to verify, and I think the parent was thinking along those lines as well.
scotty79 11y ago
All information is hard to remember when you are in serios distress. Even your name after few nights of sleep deprivation doesn't sound obvious at all. You will trash subject ability to be sure about anything well before you make him cooperaive.
PepeGomez 11y ago
You greatly underestimate how much the brain shuts down in stress situations. People may not hear being talked to, recognize familiar people or notice severe wounds. It's the reason behind such rules such as no cleanup during training - it lead to people picking up spent ammunition in real gunfights. During torture, the stress levels must be high enough so that the subject forgets that they don't want to tell you anything important, and at that point they may not be able to recall their own name. And of course people tell intentionally inaccurate, false or otherwise misleading information to avoid further torture. So torture may work for those who somehow ended up on the enemy side and don't actually care that much one way or another, but not people who are likely to have valuable information. Even the Nazis knew that and instead tried to convict the interrogated they are civilized, well meaning people.
Mz 11y ago
I don't at the moment have time to read the article, but I will note that you do NOT need to have brain damage from the torture in order for it to interfere with recall. Memory is state dependent. You recall things best when in a similar state to when you usually access that information. Placing someone in an extreme altered state can interfere with memory access of "normal" memories, without brain damage needing to occur. The degree to which memory is state dependent was really brought home to me when I had a serious medical crisis some years back. The birth of my first child was very difficult and I usually have trouble remembering the details. During my medical crisis, I was in constant extreme pain for 3.5 years. During that time, I was able to remember the birth of that child with tremendous clarity after years of remembering it foggily. You do not need to cause brain damage to interfere with mental processes like recall.

by rjtobin 11y ago

angelbob 11y ago

It's not clear that torture makes it especially likely to prevent lying about information, though. It'd be nice if he studied that instead of making us assume it, though :-P

dror 11y ago

Here's the reason that it doesn't work. Imagine that your village has a 1000 people and someone is torturing you to find out "who is your cell leader." At first you are resisting, and so you name random people in the village. After you've named 50 people or more, you break and name the real person. The torturers though don't know that this is the real person, so they'll keep torturing you, and you'll just go through every name in the village to make the torture stop. How can they separate the real person from the ones you lied about either out of resistance or to make the pain go away? In some cases this could work. They want to find out where you hid the guns, and every time, they go and dig till you break and give them the right place, and then they do find the guns.

rjtobin 11y ago
What you've said sounds like a reasonable argument why torture doesn't work in that case. My point wasn't that torture does work (I have no idea about that), just that the research outlined by O'Mara doesn't address situations like this (and so the research isn't enough to prove that "torture is ineffective" as is suggested).
cm2187 11y ago
Usually you ask for verifyable information. CIA officers do not need to be reminded what a lie is.
- e12e 11y ago
  I think the comments of the FBI revealed wrt. the CIA torture programs shows that CIA officers a) don't know how to interrogate people, and b) do need to be reminded what a lie is. I agree that if what you want is some concrete information that the subject is reluctant to give up ("Where have you buried the guns I need in order to kill the rest of your family?") -- you could probably get at that via torture. I don't know if that would typically be the fastest or most reliable way to get that information (Consider, eg: Staging an escape, allowing the subject, helped by an under-cover agent, point you to said guns). I think people get hung up on the "bomb plot theory" too much. My impression is that while such simple cases make for great TV, that's not the kind of real-world questions intelligence organizations really are concerned with. So if we say: "ok, use torture to save the children!" -- if that was taken at face value -- it means: "Disband most (all?) large-scale operations that allow torture today, such as the CIA programs." I also think there's a bit of a hang-up on "effectiveness". If you're fighting an illegal war, kidnapping and killing people that are clearly innocent -- it's hard to accept an argument from "effectiveness". At least if there's no indication that atrocities would stop if you "won".

SCAQTony 11y ago

Taking it from a more political point of view rather than neurological, Shakespeare did a political play on this subject which was summarily all about blow-back or stone cold revenge — "Titus Andronicus." (A movie by Julie Taymor of the play "Titus" is quite powerful) In politics and war The dirtiest fighter makes the rules and now that the United States tortures people, I suspect we will be "one-upped" in the next war.

marklgr 11y ago
Indeed, once you resort to torture or other "questionable" means, you can't accuse or deny enemies from using them too; this sets new standards. The argument is generally "but they already do it", and in my opinion it fails to recognize 1) the large scale validation for every belligerent, 2) the race to "no-rule" warfare, as limits are one-upped once (de facto) accepted. So it's not because _some_ belligerents are willing to use banned means that everybody should start using them too.
ZeroGravitas 11y ago
Yes, many of my worries about what my government get up to are based on the fact that they lose all moral standing when others do the same, see Russia bombing Syria for a recent example.

XorNot 11y ago

I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing. So they don't have a particular strong desire to conceal information from anyone who threatens them. This means, in an actual scenario of torture interrogation, you're pretty likely to initially withhold whatever you can. But by the time you reach an actual breaking point...well it's called that for a reason. You are in fact very unlikely to remember much of anything because of pain, shock etc. You're pretty likely to say whatever the torturer is asking to hear. Waterboarding is torture because once water gets into your oesophagus your rational mind shuts down completely - this post (http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=448717 http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=448717) pretty much summarizes it and the experience has been confirmed by everyone else who has had it done to them. That's the point about torture being ineffective. By the time it's effective, you're dealing with someone who is pretty much going to confabulate whatever you want to hear.

varjag 11y ago
> I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing. It almost sounds as if you are trying to define away torture for a fringe case where it's guaranteed to be useless. This is a legalistic approach not anymore convincing than attempts to define waterboarding as "not torture". Torture is used in the armed conflicts depressingly regularly: the corresponding clauses in Geneva Conventions for treatment of POW were added not for purely theoretic reasons. Torture is used by criminals around the world on daily basis. The reason they haven't given up after millenia of practice is that it tends to work in their unsophisticated, easily verifiable cases: getting the combination to a safe or finding where a merchant keeps their money stashed. Anyway, torture should not be used because it's simply an abhorrent thing to do to a human being. Trying to frame it in terms of performance is damaging to the moral aspect of it, as you descend to the same inhuman cost/benefit mindset as torture proponent.
- 11y ago

x5n1 11y ago

Most of the people the US was holding at gitmo and other black sites around the world were simply people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. But you never know that for sure. It's unconscionable that random innocents be tortured for they may yield some information. But allowing torture by using extreme cases like your's, in reality it is almost never that cut and dry.

bsder 11y ago

> so unless serious brain damage occurred, the subject wasn't going to forget after torture. Really? You have data on this? I'd love to see it. However, there are multiple problems with your scenario. The biggest being: what happens if the individual DOESN'T KNOW? He's going to tell you anything he can to get you to stop, and, if you could verify the crucial piece of information, you wouldn't be torturing him in the first place. So, even if I concede that torture works when you know you have the right person (and I do not), the problem is that you can't distinguish whether you have the right person and whether he actually knows the information you want.

bluecalm 11y ago
>>if you could verify the crucial piece of information, you wouldn't be torturing him in the first place. This is not true. There are many things easy to verify but difficult to discover. For example a place the money is kept in a big house.
- SilasX 11y ago
  Yeah, I always hoped HN was the last place where you actually had to convince people that NP-complete problems exist...
  - PepeGomez 11y ago
    Real world problems are often NP-hard, not NP-complete.
- saganus 11y ago
  Well yes. But I think the parent was framing it with reference to the intelligence world conflicts. At least that's how I Read it. Imagine you torture a guy to get the name of it's cell leader. You can't verify this easily. You have to capture that other guy, torture him and repeat the process. While in any of those steps you have the chance of getting false information without knowing it. I would think most intelligence from a war zone would be of this type, i.e. hard to verify, and I think the parent was thinking along those lines as well.

scotty79 11y ago

All information is hard to remember when you are in serios distress. Even your name after few nights of sleep deprivation doesn't sound obvious at all. You will trash subject ability to be sure about anything well before you make him cooperaive.

PepeGomez 11y ago

You greatly underestimate how much the brain shuts down in stress situations. People may not hear being talked to, recognize familiar people or notice severe wounds. It's the reason behind such rules such as no cleanup during training - it lead to people picking up spent ammunition in real gunfights. During torture, the stress levels must be high enough so that the subject forgets that they don't want to tell you anything important, and at that point they may not be able to recall their own name. And of course people tell intentionally inaccurate, false or otherwise misleading information to avoid further torture. So torture may work for those who somehow ended up on the enemy side and don't actually care that much one way or another, but not people who are likely to have valuable information. Even the Nazis knew that and instead tried to convict the interrogated they are civilized, well meaning people.

Mz 11y ago

I don't at the moment have time to read the article, but I will note that you do NOT need to have brain damage from the torture in order for it to interfere with recall. Memory is state dependent. You recall things best when in a similar state to when you usually access that information. Placing someone in an extreme altered state can interfere with memory access of "normal" memories, without brain damage needing to occur. The degree to which memory is state dependent was really brought home to me when I had a serious medical crisis some years back. The birth of my first child was very difficult and I usually have trouble remembering the details. During my medical crisis, I was in constant extreme pain for 3.5 years. During that time, I was able to remember the birth of that child with tremendous clarity after years of remembering it foggily. You do not need to cause brain damage to interfere with mental processes like recall.