SoylentNews

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.

---

Original Submission

• Re:applying the method to that kid PROPERLY Re:applying the method to that kid PROPERLY (Score: 2) by TheRaven on Monday July 31 2017, @08:58AM (1 child)

  by TheRaven (270) on Monday July 31 2017, @08:58AM (#547044) Journal

  There are two issues: the moral and the pragmatic.

  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

  Parent

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		2

• Re:applying the method to that kid PROPERLY (Score: 4, Informative) by driverless on Monday July 31 2017, @09:31AM

  by driverless (4770) on Monday July 31 2017, @09:31AM (#547065)

  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.

  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.

  Parent