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Millionaire CIA Torture Psychologists to Face Trial

posted by martyb on Sunday July 30 2017, @11:28PM   
from the Rosenhan-Milgram-Dunning-Kruger-research dept.

cafebabe writes:

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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Original Submission

• It's not useless (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @10:25AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @10:25AM (#547074)

  It's not a binary option "It works/it's useless".

  Note: We are talking about getting information, not torture to get a confession, to send a message or as retaliation. Jus to get valid information.

  It's documented that there is what they call the breaking point. Before the breaking point, the tortured guy will resists, won't tell any thing or lie, the information is not reliable. After the breaking point the tortured will tell anything he thinks you want to hear to stop torture and information is not reliable. There is a small window of time when the tortured may say valid information. So, recognising when the victim is in the small window is the most important to get valid information.

  Getting information by torture is many times useless and not as easy as many supporters of torture think. The interrogator must be skilled to notice the breaking point, unfortunately, many times he is not an skilled interrogator but just a sadist (to overcome the natural empathy towards another human screaming, they must be sadists or have become sadists). The information may have become irrelevant when you get it (i.e accomplices may have flown) . That is why captured try to resist and get time, and interrogators try to sell that resistance is futile, they already know everything.

  The justification behind torture is a neat division between "we" and "they". They can be tortured, we will never be tortured.

  If you torture someone that hasn't any relevant information, the window time of breaking point is zero, he will pass from telling "I know nothing" to tell anything. Nothing wrong, it's one of them, not one of us. The only regret is the waste of time. It is like picking oysters, some have pearls, some don't, no regrets about the poor oysters.

  If you accept torture of enemies as fair play. They torture as well to us. Of course USA citizens may think "Well, they are in the other side of the world, so I will never be tortured. And the battle is so asymmetric that my soldiers will seldom be captured and tortured." And probably they are right.

  If you accept torture as a legal activity in your own country, you are playing with fire. i.e. your son, a college student, is friend of someone whose family suspect of terrorism, they may pick your son, and give him back to you with physical and psychological damage, or dead. And everything would be legal. By the way once you accept legal torture in certain cases, won't remain too long restricted to certain cases. The cases when will only expand.

  In short: Torture works a little to get information. But if you accept torture as a common practice, you are going to live live in a much tougher world, and in a very little safer world. is it worth?

  Note: The information about torture is from a manual of the School of the Americas [wikipedia.org] a read long time ago.

  Parent

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