That’s good hear. Can we torture the bastards before we execute them. They caused so many people unspeakable pain. Not the mention the wars.
You actually promote torture? Really man, think about that.
War is hell. Torture/interrogation has a time and place. This is definitely one of those times.
You really approve of using torture as a punishment? That kind of fucks with my head, to be honest.
In war? Absolutely.
Why?
Because it is war. Completely different set of rules. Extracting information can save hundreds if not thousands of lives.
And you believe that torture is an effective, ethical and legal way to do that?
The Geneva Convention signatories would disagree.
Yes i believe it can be very effective when extracting vital information. Also, name a country the us has fought that followed the Geneva convention.
So your argument is "everybody else does it?". Why is that relevant? The US is a signatory, is it not?
If you are willing to use torture just because your enemies do it, you have no basis to claim any moral high ground.
Plus, you don't know the research data on forced confessions very well.
I could care less about moral ground. I m all for it if it saves lives. Doesn’t Canada do the same?
So you don't care if you're doing what you castigate others for, and you don't care if it actually is effective.
Wonderful. But not actually surprising.
Not surprising that you are advocating for the rights of people who orchestrated an attack that killed nearly 3,000 civilians. Yeah those people deserved ehat was done to them. Maybe if Canada had some sort of event like 9/11 you would feel different.
arent we supposed to be better than that? if what we have is so exceptional for the world, then dont we have to live it? adhere to the founding principles?to abandon that in the face of that horror, shows we arent. they win/won. if thats the case we should stop kidding ourselves and rip it up. it becomes meaningless.
Not in this instance. These people are the definition of evil and deserve what happened to them after being captured. They attacked our soil by flying four commercial jets into areas of civilian life, why do we have to be better than them? What would you have done with them?
the rule of law is everything or it is nothing. choose.
9/11 was different, you know that. Plus when this happened it was legal under W.
no. it applies ALWAYS or never. choose.
If it saves American or allied lives than I am all for it.
then tear the constitution up and use it for toilet paper.
every single service member swears an oath to preserve and defend that document and the ldeals it contains.
There are no exceptions.
Where in the constitution does it say that? Pretty sure patriot act gives us permission to do so. And I agree with meltdown, there should be no rules with war. We lose when politicians get involved.
pssst we werent at war with nonstate actors. which al Qaeda is.
so let me ask you this. Where in the constitution does it say the rule of law applies except for when ......?
The patriot act? And again, it was legal under W which is when it happened.
then deemed illegal, so it kinda calls into question its initial legality OR SCOTUS wouldnt have knocked that down.
psst slavery was legal at one time too....
Correct, the 13th amendment took care of that. However I still stand by my opinion that torture should be used in interrogations when trying to extract vital information in order to save American or allied lives.
What proof do you have that torture saves lives? Where's your data?
It s something I believe in. I have no reason to show statistics to prove my own opinion. And I really do believe if four commercial airliners flew into civilians buildings in Canada you would feel different.
As a wise person once said, you can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own facts.
If one is going to advocate for illegal measures with the rationale that it will save lives, I would think that you would at least be interested in knowing if it saves lives or not. Since you’re not, we can assume that’s it’s an emotional decision geared at punishment, and not in fact an attempt to gain information.
I disagree with your analyzation of my own opinion. Moving on.
I nominate this for "Most Depressing Thread Of The Year".
It’s definitely not a fun topic to discuss. The world forever changed on 9/11. another huge date in history: ww2 officially started 80 years ago today.
I nominate this for "Most Depressing Thread Of The Year".
It’s definitely not a fun topic to discuss. The world forever changed on 9/11. another huge date in history: ww2 officially started 80 years ago today.
We are becoming more and more a forgetful society. WWII is kind of a big deal to me because my Pop served in the Solomon Islands and I heard many a story about those years. But how many millennials (I know- any chance to pick on the millenials, right? lol) give much thought to WWII? Or 9/11 for that matter? We're a jaded society and we move on from one thing to the next, many I think actually eager for the next tragedy to get that vicarious rush of death and destruction. We soon won't need torture. Life will be torture.
Like I said, most depressing thread of the year.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
I nominate this for "Most Depressing Thread Of The Year".
It’s definitely not a fun topic to discuss. The world forever changed on 9/11. another huge date in history: ww2 officially started 80 years ago today.
We are becoming more and more a forgetful society. WWII is kind of a big deal to me because my Pop served in the Solomon Islands and I heard many a story about those years. But how many millennials (I know- any chance to pick on the millenials, right? lol) give much thought to WWII? Or 9/11 for that matter? We're a jaded society and we move on from one thing to the next, many I think actually eager for the next tragedy to get that vicarious rush of death and destruction. We soon won't need torture. Life will be torture.
Like I said, most depressing thread of the year.
For the past 18 years I did my part by teaching 9/11, world war 2 and heavily emphasizing the study of Holocaust/genocide. This year I got switched to teaching world history, soooo boring.
I nominate this for "Most Depressing Thread Of The Year".
It’s definitely not a fun topic to discuss. The world forever changed on 9/11. another huge date in history: ww2 officially started 80 years ago today.
We are becoming more and more a forgetful society. WWII is kind of a big deal to me because my Pop served in the Solomon Islands and I heard many a story about those years. But how many millennials (I know- any chance to pick on the millenials, right? lol) give much thought to WWII? Or 9/11 for that matter? We're a jaded society and we move on from one thing to the next, many I think actually eager for the next tragedy to get that vicarious rush of death and destruction. We soon won't need torture. Life will be torture.
Like I said, most depressing thread of the year.
For the past 18 years I did my part by teaching 9/11, world war 2 and heavily emphasizing the study of Holocaust/genocide. This year I got switched to teaching world history, soooo boring.
I sure found it boring when I was a student. What it basically boiled down to was memorizing names and dates. I reguritated enough of the information to get a passing grade and then immediately forgot it all. Maybe try teaching concepts and the interconnection of events throughout history and how they relate to where we are today and how those events leading up to today affects kids lives and their future. No easy task though, I will admit. Hope it goes well for you.
“The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man [or woman] who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”
That’s good hear. Can we torture the bastards before we execute them. They caused so many people unspeakable pain. Not the mention the wars.
You actually promote torture? Really man, think about that.
War is hell. Torture/interrogation has a time and place. This is definitely one of those times.
You really approve of using torture as a punishment? That kind of fucks with my head, to be honest.
In war? Absolutely.
Why?
Because it is war. Completely different set of rules. Extracting information can save hundreds if not thousands of lives.
And you believe that torture is an effective, ethical and legal way to do that?
The Geneva Convention signatories would disagree.
Yes i believe it can be very effective when extracting vital information. Also, name a country the us has fought that followed the Geneva convention.
So your argument is "everybody else does it?". Why is that relevant? The US is a signatory, is it not?
If you are willing to use torture just because your enemies do it, you have no basis to claim any moral high ground.
Plus, you don't know the research data on forced confessions very well.
I could care less about moral ground. I m all for it if it saves lives. Doesn’t Canada do the same?
So you don't care if you're doing what you castigate others for, and you don't care if it actually is effective.
Wonderful. But not actually surprising.
Not surprising that you are advocating for the rights of people who orchestrated an attack that killed nearly 3,000 civilians. Yeah those people deserved ehat was done to them. Maybe if Canada had some sort of event like 9/11 you would feel different.
arent we supposed to be better than that? if what we have is so exceptional for the world, then dont we have to live it? adhere to the founding principles?to abandon that in the face of that horror, shows we arent. they win/won. if thats the case we should stop kidding ourselves and rip it up. it becomes meaningless.
Not in this instance. These people are the definition of evil and deserve what happened to them after being captured. They attacked our soil by flying four commercial jets into areas of civilian life, why do we have to be better than them? What would you have done with them?
the rule of law is everything or it is nothing. choose.
9/11 was different, you know that. Plus when this happened it was legal under W.
no. it applies ALWAYS or never. choose.
If it saves American or allied lives than I am all for it.
then tear the constitution up and use it for toilet paper.
every single service member swears an oath to preserve and defend that document and the ldeals it contains.
There are no exceptions.
Where in the constitution does it say that? Pretty sure patriot act gives us permission to do so. And I agree with meltdown, there should be no rules with war. We lose when politicians get involved.
pssst we werent at war with nonstate actors. which al Qaeda is.
so let me ask you this. Where in the constitution does it say the rule of law applies except for when ......?
The patriot act? And again, it was legal under W which is when it happened.
then deemed illegal, so it kinda calls into question its initial legality OR SCOTUS wouldnt have knocked that down.
psst slavery was legal at one time too....
Correct, the 13th amendment took care of that. However I still stand by my opinion that torture should be used in interrogations when trying to extract vital information in order to save American or allied lives.
Has it been proven that your odds of extracting vital, accurate information to prevent human harm actually do increase if you use torture? I sure hope you know that answer is a definitive 'yes' if you're going to claim that it's morally acceptable to succumb humans to pain for that result. I'm quite sure I've heard the opposite, which is why I ask. I'll try to find a source for what I'd read.
Edit: I'd also love to know how many were tortured and later proven innocent (or just never proven, which should be seen as the same as innocent), as a percentage of how many tortured led to valuable, timely, actionable information
Post edited by benjs on
'05 - TO, '06 - TO 1, '08 - NYC 1 & 2, '09 - TO, Chi 1 & 2, '10 - Buffalo, NYC 1 & 2, '11 - TO 1 & 2, Hamilton, '13 - Buffalo, Brooklyn 1 & 2, '15 - Global Citizen, '16 - TO 1 & 2, Chi 2
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That’s good hear. Can we torture the bastards before we execute them. They caused so many people unspeakable pain. Not the mention the wars.
You actually promote torture? Really man, think about that.
War is hell. Torture/interrogation has a time and place. This is definitely one of those times.
You really approve of using torture as a punishment? That kind of fucks with my head, to be honest.
In war? Absolutely.
Why?
Because it is war. Completely different set of rules. Extracting information can save hundreds if not thousands of lives.
And you believe that torture is an effective, ethical and legal way to do that?
The Geneva Convention signatories would disagree.
What proof do you have that torture saves lives? Where's your data?
It s something I believe in. I have no reason to show statistics to prove my own opinion. And I really do believe if four commercial airliners flew into civilians buildings in Canada you would feel different.
As a wise person once said, you can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own facts.
If one is going to advocate for illegal measures with the rationale that it will save lives, I would think that you would at least be interested in knowing if it saves lives or not. Since you’re not, we can assume that’s it’s an emotional decision geared at punishment, and not in fact an attempt to gain information.
I disagree with your analyzation of my own opinion. Moving on.
Convenient to want to move on when your stance is being questioned.
Some easy, readable sources about the ineffectiveness of torture. The Scientific American piece is very brief, the NYT one much more in depth and debunks a number of the CIA's claims of information it has received via torture. Even the American Senate's analysts agreed it is ineffective, particularly when reviewing the torture of suspected terrorists in this very case. Interestingly, the has CIA lied again and again about its use of torture methods and the usefulness of the information gained, including in the capture of bin Laden; none of the intelligence used to find him came from torture - excuse me, "enhanced interrogation" - but instead from more routine investigative methods.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
That’s good hear. Can we torture the bastards before we execute them. They caused so many people unspeakable pain. Not the mention the wars.
You actually promote torture? Really man, think about that.
War is hell. Torture/interrogation has a time and place. This is definitely one of those times.
You really approve of using torture as a punishment? That kind of fucks with my head, to be honest.
In war? Absolutely.
Why?
Because it is war. Completely different set of rules. Extracting information can save hundreds if not thousands of lives.
And you believe that torture is an effective, ethical and legal way to do that?
The Geneva Convention signatories would disagree.
Yes i believe it can be very effective when extracting vital information. Also, name a country the us has fought that followed the Geneva convention.
So your argument is "everybody else does it?". Why is that relevant? The US is a signatory, is it not?
If you are willing to use torture just because your enemies do it, you have no basis to claim any moral high ground.
Plus, you don't know the research data on forced confessions very well.
I could care less about moral ground. I m all for it if it saves lives. Doesn’t Canada do the same?
So you don't care if you're doing what you castigate others for, and you don't care if it actually is effective.
Wonderful. But not actually surprising.
Not surprising that you are advocating for the rights of people who orchestrated an attack that killed nearly 3,000 civilians. Yeah those people deserved ehat was done to them. Maybe if Canada had some sort of event like 9/11 you would feel different.
arent we supposed to be better than that? if what we have is so exceptional for the world, then dont we have to live it? adhere to the founding principles?to abandon that in the face of that horror, shows we arent. they win/won. if thats the case we should stop kidding ourselves and rip it up. it becomes meaningless.
Not in this instance. These people are the definition of evil and deserve what happened to them after being captured. They attacked our soil by flying four commercial jets into areas of civilian life, why do we have to be better than them? What would you have done with them?
the rule of law is everything or it is nothing. choose.
9/11 was different, you know that. Plus when this happened it was legal under W.
no. it applies ALWAYS or never. choose.
If it saves American or allied lives than I am all for it.
then tear the constitution up and use it for toilet paper.
every single service member swears an oath to preserve and defend that document and the ldeals it contains.
There are no exceptions.
Where in the constitution does it say that? Pretty sure patriot act gives us permission to do so. And I agree with meltdown, there should be no rules with war. We lose when politicians get involved.
no modern war starts without a politician or group of.
That’s good hear. Can we torture the bastards before we execute them. They caused so many people unspeakable pain. Not the mention the wars.
You actually promote torture? Really man, think about that.
War is hell. Torture/interrogation has a time and place. This is definitely one of those times.
You really approve of using torture as a punishment? That kind of fucks with my head, to be honest.
In war? Absolutely.
Why?
Because it is war. Completely different set of rules. Extracting information can save hundreds if not thousands of lives.
And you believe that torture is an effective, ethical and legal way to do that?
The Geneva Convention signatories would disagree.
Yes i believe it can be very effective when extracting vital information. Also, name a country the us has fought that followed the Geneva convention.
So your argument is "everybody else does it?". Why is that relevant? The US is a signatory, is it not?
If you are willing to use torture just because your enemies do it, you have no basis to claim any moral high ground.
Plus, you don't know the research data on forced confessions very well.
I could care less about moral ground. I m all for it if it saves lives. Doesn’t Canada do the same?
So you don't care if you're doing what you castigate others for, and you don't care if it actually is effective.
Wonderful. But not actually surprising.
Not surprising that you are advocating for the rights of people who orchestrated an attack that killed nearly 3,000 civilians. Yeah those people deserved ehat was done to them. Maybe if Canada had some sort of event like 9/11 you would feel different.
do some research on how many civilians US/allied forces have killed over the last 20+ years. do those ends justify those means?
Comments
another huge date in history: ww2 officially started 80 years ago today.
This year I got switched to teaching world history, soooo boring.
Edit: I'd also love to know how many were tortured and later proven innocent (or just never proven, which should be seen as the same as innocent), as a percentage of how many tortured led to valuable, timely, actionable information
EV
Toronto Film Festival 9/11/2007, '08 - Toronto 1 & 2, '09 - Albany 1, '11 - Chicago 1
Some easy, readable sources about the ineffectiveness of torture. The Scientific American piece is very brief, the NYT one much more in depth and debunks a number of the CIA's claims of information it has received via torture. Even the American Senate's analysts agreed it is ineffective, particularly when reviewing the torture of suspected terrorists in this very case. Interestingly, the has CIA lied again and again about its use of torture methods and the usefulness of the information gained, including in the capture of bin Laden; none of the intelligence used to find him came from torture - excuse me, "enhanced interrogation" - but instead from more routine investigative methods.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/we-rsquo-ve-known-for-400-years-that-torture-doesn-rsquo-t-work/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/12/08/world/does-torture-work-the-cias-claims-and-what-the-committee-found.html
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830471-200-torture-doesnt-work-says-science-why-are-we-still-doing-it/
Why Torture Doesn’t Work has a specific origin, says its author Shane O’Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of the “Torture Memos”, legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other “enhanced interrogation” techniques.
Morality aside, O’Mara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that “the intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case”. Advocates defend torture with an “ad hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios”, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions – alarmingly easy to produce.
As O’Mara emphasises, torture does not produce reliable information largely because of the severity with which it impairs the ability to think. Extreme pain, cold, sleep deprivation and fear of torture itself all damage memory, mood and cognition. Torture does not persuade people to make a reasoned decision to cooperate, but produces panic, dissociation, unconsciousness and long-term neurological damage. It also produces an intense desire to keep talking to prevent further torture.
O’Mara quotes an intelligence officer’s story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: “He told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia’s son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.”
“Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O’Mara.
Why Torture Doesn’t Work is a valuable book. O’Mara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the “Torture Memos”. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O’Mara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be “ineffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes”.
Read more: https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22830471-200-torture-doesnt-work-says-science-why-are-we-still-doing-it/#ixzz5yOCgRggu
The great documentary 24 and Jack Bauer would never steer me wrong.
Not today Sir, Probably not tomorrow.............................................. bayfront arena st. pete '94
you're finally here and I'm a mess................................................... nationwide arena columbus '10
memories like fingerprints are slowly raising.................................... first niagara center buffalo '13
another man ..... moved by sleight of hand...................................... joe louis arena detroit '14
Ooohh.
"Pfffft your science!"
I think I want that on a t shirt
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and yes, I'm sure the torturers have long lasting emotional/mental effects, just as many executioners will tell you.
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