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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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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else
follows in the same way.
-- Alan J. Perlis
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 31 2017, @03:33AM (1 child)
There are two ways to use torture.
a. You have a way to test the information, and good reason to believe that they have it. For example, they yanked the power to a computer with an encrypted hard drive as you raided their place. Every time they "tell their interrogator whatever they think will stop the torture", which is of course the password, you go test the password on a copy of the seized computer.
b. You have a way to test similar information, and good reason to believe that they have what you want. Here, you might know the answers to 90 out of 100 interesting questions. You ask all 100 questions. If you are getting mostly wrong answers for the 90 questions you know about, then you can't trust the answers for the other 10. Keep torturing until you are getting good answers.
So those things "things everyone knows about torture" are just wrong. Use it right, and it works great.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Whoever on Monday July 31 2017, @05:52AM
Above comment is complete BS.
What really happens when used with confirmation is that the torturers merely attempt to confirm their own biases. Objective truth doesn't enter the process.