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Torture is pointless since the counter-interrogation method while being tortured is to never admit to anything. Giving any information just invites more torture
by dobbsbob 13y ago
Torture is pointless since the counter-interrogation method while being tortured is to never admit to anything. Giving any information just invites more torture because if there is a bit of info then there must be more and they will keep torturing you, at least according to the IRA green book. The French wrote about how useless torture is for intel as well when they decided to use it wholesale in the Algerian war. It produced nothing, yet in 2014 this fallacy is still around and we are still doing it.
- k2enemy 13y agoSee here for a mathematical treatment of this: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jel292/torture.pdf http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jel292/torture.pdf
- tzs 13y agoThe IRA green book may not be a reliable source of information on this. Wouldn't it give the same advice even if giving up information in reality usually made the torture stop? The book's goal there is to get prisoners to not talk, not to help prisoners have the least unpleasant experience in captivity. I'd expect that the captor's expectation is that prisoners have a non-zero finite amount of useful information, and that in many cases the captor has some idea of how much and what kind of information the prisoner has. If the prisoner does not give up information, wouldn't the incentive for the captors to be to keep torturing because they are sure that there is something to get? Strategically, it should be best for the prisoner to give up information that matches what the torturers were looking for, so that it is plausible that when the prisoner says he has no more that he is telling the truth.