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posted by
martyb
on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:28PM
from the Rosenhan-Milgram-Dunning-Kruger-research dept.
from the Rosenhan-Milgram-Dunning-Kruger-research dept.
From Wikileaks (via Vinay Gupta):
Judge rules two psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, who made millions as consultants for the CIA's torture program can face trial.
How do you get into the business of being a torture consultant? Good question because when they started:
Neither man had ever carried out a real interrogation, had language skills or expertise on al Qaeda - the chief enemy in the war on terror - when the CIA handpicked Mitchell and Jessen to spearhead its supposed intelligence gathering program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Their psychology backgrounds were in family therapy; their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure.
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Millionaire CIA Torture Psychologists to Face Trial
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The light at the end of the tunnel is the headlight of an approaching train.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Monday July 31 2017, @08:32AM (2 children)
You CAN create scenarios in which the "confession" is controlled for honesty, or for the results you want. But, they are only scenarios. I came up with the kid and the broken windows, only to make it more personal - NO ONE can justify torturing a kid for such a petty reason. No one but a very sick individual. Yeah, in that case, you can probably control for accuracy and honesty, because you probably know a lot about the kid.
Out in the bigger world, how you gonna control for honesty? You captured this guy in Outback, Nowhere, and he's not in your data sets. He's grown up with little interaction with computers, and he likes it that way. The computer systems he HAS interacted with belong to hostile governments. You can't access anything on him. You have little idea what his intelligence value is, unless someone snitched on him - and how the hell do you trust your snitches? Maybe the snitches belong to a rival tribe of people, and the snitches see a chance to get rid of a powerful person from that rival tribe.
I've read many times that interrogators almost invariably get better results when by befriend the "suspect". There's a reason they have that old reliable "good cop, bad cop" routine. Sure, you can threaten the suspect with any kind of stupid crap you like. The cops don't EXPECT the "bad cop" to get results. It's the "good cop" who extracts information after the asshole has made his threats. But, don't believe me - read the reports: https://duckduckgo.com/html/ [duckduckgo.com]
I don't think that you will find a single case in which government has made a credible claim that intelligence extracted by torture was effective, timely, and saved lives. I don't recall ever reading one single report to that effect. I believe that I have read some bullshit political excuses that attempted to justify torture, mostly by Dick Cheney and company. No credible reports from field agents though.
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday July 31 2017, @08:58AM (1 child)
The moral argument is usually countered by appealing to relative levels of evil. Is it better to torture one person to get the information that will let you save 10 lives? 100? 1000? If you're confident that the person has the information that you need to save 1,000 innocent lives, is it worse to let those people die or torture someone you're 90% confident is responsible and could give you the information to save them?
There's a bunch of research on the effectiveness of torture. The basic outcome is simple: people will tell you whatever they think will make you stop torturing them. In most cases, this means that there is no pragmatic argument for torture. Unless you can instantly verify the information that you're given, people will tell you anything just for the respite while you go away and verify it. As you say, there have been no cases made public where this was the case, and the sort of situation in which it might be are pretty far fetched.
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Informative) by driverless on Monday July 31 2017, @09:31AM
A former neighbour of mine was part of a military unit that, uh, operated some way behind enemy lines. He mentioned on a couple of occasions that one thing they never did to get information was torture someone, because the information was useless for the exact reason you give. They used other methods, e.g. local sympathisers or just general good intel, but never torture, because all it produced was really bad intel, and one thing they were really careful with was making sure the planning was done right because if anything went wrong there was no backup or support coming. In part because of this, his unit never lost a man - specifically, they never left anyone behind, although they did take (nonfatal) casualties.