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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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I recently came across this little quillette article. https://quillette.com/2022/10/14/sundance-succumbs-to-social-panic/ where a film of jihadist rehabilitation is cancelled for being "islamophobic". Part of it as I read in the situation is that is a "white woman" is trying to sell the idea that one can be deprogrammed from ideological capture. I suspect that there is a deeper reason (which I can't prove) that we shouldn't go around believing that extremists can be redeemed or deprogrammed. This includes of course that there is no redemption arc for right-wing white nationalist extremists.

As an outsider to US politics I was fascinated by the apparatus of US media to "manufacturing of consent" to fighting terrorism of the evil jihadists with things like "enhanced interrogation techniques" a.k.a. torture. There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured. Also properly motivated persons can withstand extraordinary amounts of pain and delay the divulging of useful intel to the interrogator. So it is not an effective way of gathering information about impending attacks, because motivated and trained people can delay, lie or do anything in between to fulfill their goals and innocent people will probably just make something up to make the torture stop by guessing what the interrogator wants to hear. Yet we have multiple seasons of 24 to implant the idea that torture is effective. The critique of that show is that it was "islamophobic" because it painted the jihadist as an unredemptive terrorists.

I find it fascinating that less than a couple of decades ago the right thought that extremists where irredeemable from their idealogical capturing, but now the left is touting similar reasoning with white supremacists and throws jihadist redemption under the bus, in the same breath.

There is a whole TV-series produced to skew the narrative that torture is effective way to combat terror, despite that there being ample evidence that people being tortured will eventually make shit up to avoid being tortured.

To be honest I am extremely skeptical of this conclusion for two reasons. First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought. For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun. Second, the conclusion that torture does not work is suspiciously close to support moral intuition of modern western researchers, I would hardly expect some research in the vein of "torture is moderately effective, but historical evidence such as study of notes by Gestapo and Khmer Rouge investigators shows that torturing prisoner's children in front them increases investigative efficiency by 346%. Further study in Guantanamo is needed". I do not think this would gather much praise for any Psychology journal.

The way that militaries compartmentalization information is evidence in favor of torture working, or at least that they believe it can work.

Not that torture doesn't work, but enough information leaks through 'spies' or 'telling a friend' or 'posting it on reddit' that it'd happen either way

Exactly, if it is bad, it must not work. See also this hilarious twitter thread in which Richard Dawkins tries to explain that eugenics would work:

https://twitter.com/richarddawkins/status/1228943686953664512

used for thousands of years in every war humans fought

Sure...but that doesn’t make it good at getting intelligence.

We’ve fought wars for stupid reasons, and we’ve committed atrocities out of carelessness or vitriol. Was sacking Constantinople particularly rational? Compared to waging war, torture is an afterthought, convenient and perhaps gratifying. I don’t think its historical prevalence is due to efficiency.

Was sacking Constantinople particularly rational?

Yes, sacking Constantinople was an extremely good idea.

How about you try being a 95 year old blind man in charge of the excommunicated Venetian troops that just stormed the walls and then you say to them "Actually I've changed my mind, you're NOT allowed to plunder".

How well do you think that's going to end for you?

Oh, I'm sure the commanders were picking the best of bad options. It still would have been better if they had any plausible way to keep the city intact!

Likewise, I'd prefer not to have committed any prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, even though the perpetrators seemed to be having fun. (obviously NSFW)

I think perhaps the US is just bad at torture and there’s a good chance we tortured a lot of the wrong people.

If you want to torture someone for information, ask them a mix of questions you know the answer to, and questions you don't. If they lie about one of the questions you know the answer to, torture them. Since they don't know which questions you know the answer to, they'll give you good answers for both sets of questions.

You should start with questions you know the answer to and only gradually throw in ones you don't.

Also, this doesn't apply to information that can be verified, like torturing someone to get their password.

First, torture including torture as part of military intelligence gathering as well as counterinsurgency was used for thousands of years probably in every war humans fought.

And here is the rub. The argument the anti-torture crowd are making is not "Torture is useless for all purposes." It is "Statements made under torture are unusually unreliable, and therefore interrogation under torture does not produce actionable intelligence." The premise has been a principle of English evidence law since time immemorial (the first explicit documentation that torture evidence is never admissible in English courts is as late as the 1460's, but Fortescue implies that the rule was old in his day), and the conclusion follows from it as night follows day.

The famous medieval civil and ecclesiastical torturers did not use torture to extract intelligence - they used it to extract confessions (usually true ones, as is the case with all corrupt policing, but frequently false ones) - because this worked in Roman-law inspired systems including Canon Law everywhere and Civil Law in most of Continental Europe.

In wartime, we don't have as much visibility because military law isn't a thing until modern bureaucratic states. We do know that medieval knights liked to "get medieval" on defeated peasants and townsfolk, but this doesn't look like torture for intelligence gathering - based on my knowledge it is a combination of sadistic revenge and torture as a terror-weapon to deter future rebellions. "Getting medieval" on knightly POWs was prohibited by the rules of Chivalry (which doesn't mean that it didn't happen, of course, but it does mean that it was not seen as a usual incident of warfare).

When military law does become a thing, the first written prohibition of torturing POWs appears to be included in the 1863 Lieber Code (issued by Abraham Lincoln to govern Union troops in the Civil War - again the Lieber code states that it is formalising a rule that has existed for a long time. The Lieber Code formed the basis of the 1907 Hague Convention which was the first international treaty prohibiting torture in wartime. The Hague Convention was agreed by military leaders who all agreed that aggressive war was legal and sometimes ethical, and from the records of the debates leading up to the Convention we know that they would not have banned torture if they thought it had military utility.

The reason for this is obvious. Telling someone in a position to inflict pain on you truth they don't want to hear is a bad idea (just like speaking truth to power in any other context), and we all know this viscerally. The only way to make the torture stop is to work out what the torturer wants to hear, and tell them that. So the only truth you can extract under torture is the truth you already know. In theory you could develop a technique of interrogation under torture where you "calibrated" the victim's response by asking questions you did know the answer to and punishing incorrect answers before switching to the information you actually wanted. In practice, nobody has done this, and the people who have the expertise required to do it are unanimous that you would be better off offering a hot meal and a cigarette in exchange for sincere co-operation.

The most famous example of systematic use of torture for intelligence gathering in a counterinsurgency was the French in Algeria. They lost that one. The most recent example was the waterboarding of KSM and a small number of other high-value Al-Quaeda captives at CIA black sites. Eventually KSM realised that what he needed to say to stop the torture was that Saddam Hussein was helping him. Obviously, that was believed stat by the Bush administration. They lost that one too.

Telling someone in a position to inflict pain on you truth they don't want to hear is a bad idea (just like speaking truth to power in any other context), and we all know this viscerally. The only way to make the torture stop is to work out what the torturer wants to hear, and tell them that. So the only truth you can extract under torture is the truth you already know.

You're confusing torture used to extract a confession with torture used to extract military intelligence. It is possible to have those things entangled in reality, like, the tortured person lies about the location of the bomb because he doesn't know the real location and wants the torture to stop. But if you just want the data and don't have preferences regarding its content other than you get it, and you have a relatively short feedback loop, I don't see any reason for why it won't work.

Torturing someone with an aim to learn that Saddam Hussein gave them money is pointless. Torturing someone to betray their contacts or sabotage targets or whatever useful non-loaded intelligence can work.

You're confusing torture used to extract a confession with torture used to extract military intelligence. It is possible to have those things entangled in reality, like, the tortured person lies about the location of the bomb because he doesn't know the real location and wants the torture to stop.

I am not confusing them. I am explicitly making the claim that this is a distinction without a difference, because torture to extract confessions works so well that even when you think you are trying to extract actionable intelligence the person you are torturing is actually thinking "what does he want me to confess to?" I make this argument purely from authority because I have no experience torturing people, and I sincerely hope that nobody else on the thread does either. But an argument from authority beats a hunch. Note that the required condition for torture to be a good idea is not "You occasionally get true intel you would not have got by being nice" - it is "In expectation, torture for intel produces a net benefit compared to not doing it"

I don't see any reason for why it won't work.

The authors of the medieval law books, the 1863 Lieber Code, the 1907 Hague Conventions, and the US Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogations do. And they have a lot more experience than you.

There have been a number of cases where evil regimes set up permanent corps of professional torturers with doctrine, field manuals, line and staff hierarchies etc. (The CIA torture programme post 9-11 was not one of them - one of the surprises in the Senate report that shocked even the pro-torture Republicans on the committee is just how unprofessional it was) The most famous are the Spanish Inquisition and the Soviet GPU/NKVD/KGB. In all these cases, the aim was to extract confessions. The nearest thing to a corps of professional torturers focussed on intelligence gathering was French military intelligence during the Algerian war of independence. The torturers destroyed their records so we don't know how well it worked, but we do know that the French lost the war.

because torture to extract confessions works so well that even when you think you are trying to extract actionable intelligence the person you are torturing is actually thinking "what does he want me to confess to?"

Yeah, but he knows that if he confesses to the wrong thing, he will be tortured more. So there is a failure mode where he really doesn't know the information that you're interested in and so makes something up, but if you're aware of this failure mode and the subject does in fact have the information you're interested in, you probably can extract it reliably.

Consider for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Reinhard_Heydrich#Investigation_and_manhunt. When Nazis did it, it worked.

The most famous are the Spanish Inquisition and the Soviet GPU/NKVD/KGB. In all these cases, the aim was to extract confessions.

Are you saying that an office dedicated to extracting intelligence tends to transform to extracting confessions? I'm not following, what's the evidence for is this supposed to be?

The nearest thing to a corps of professional torturers focussed on intelligence gathering was French military intelligence during the Algerian war of independence. The torturers destroyed their records so we don't know how well it worked, but we do know that the French lost the war.

As far as I understand from reading Wikipedia, the French military won the war against the Algerians decisively, then lost the war against the French journalists, in a very similar fashion to how the US military utterly destroyed the Viet Cong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tet_Offensive), then lost the Vietnam war to the US journalists.

The argument the anti-torture crowd are making is not "Torture is useless for all purposes."

That is the exact argument I reliably hear from them. Bringing up that some torture gets useful intelligence generates a lot of hostility and denial.

(EDIT I got called a "torture apologist" for saying that some torture gets useful intelligence by this very person, so, yep, this conversation went exactly the way I thought it would.)

The anti-torture movement has been colonized nearly completely by people opposed to Bush's GWOT and they want him to be both stupid and evil.

I'm not saying Bush's use of torture was stupid - it was a logical plan to achieve his goals. He wanted to start a (second) land war in Asia, and in order to sell it to the normally-isolationist Republican base he needed false intelligence that Iraq was helping Al-Quaeda. Torturing KSM was a good way of getting it. (The bad info on WMD had a different target audience, including people like me, and was in any case probably an honest mistake). Nobody is questioning that torture is useful when what you want is a false confession, or even a true one.

I am saying that the intelligence gained by torturing KSM was net-negative for the US, because the most consequential thing we got out of him was false.

I am also saying that John Fortescue writing in the 1460's, Abraham Lincoln issuing executive orders in 1863, and the negotiators of the 1907 Hague Conventions were not motivated by their attitude to the foreign policy of George W Bush.

I'm not saying Bush's use of torture was stupid

I am not saying it was, either. But I am saying the anti-torture movement did not want to have an uncomfortable discussion that we were leaving a useful tool on the table by declining to torture, because "it does not work anyway."

But life is not a morality play. Sometimes making the morally right decision leaves you worse off. That is why it is called the moral decision. If you pay nothing for your principles they are not principles.

Nobody is questioning that torture is useful when what you want is a false confession, or even a true one

See, now, this is even worse. Torture can absolutely get confirmable information out of a person. That is extremely useful in a conflict. Pretending it is just useful for false confessions to manufacture a war is refusing to face reality.

An anti-torture movement that is built the idea that torture does not work is built on a foundation of lies and will crumble to dust in the first strong wind.

An anti-torture movement that says "yes torture works, but we refuse to do it, because those are our principles" is healthy in the long term.

Is it controversial that Bush was both stupid and evil?

President George W. Bush didn't even know of the existence of the Sunni and Shia sects in Iraq until 3 months before the invasion, after the decision had been made to attack and they were well into the war-justification phase. Only when they brought in an Iraqi dissident did he tell Bush about it. This is from Galbraith's book "The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War Without End". What kind of idiot doesn't read a brief summary of the country he's planning to invade? The whole war was conducted in an incredibly reckless and ill-planned way, with predictably catastrophic consequences for the region. Bush didn't know about the Shia majority in Iraq, how this would obviously give the Iranians a way to influence the country if he demolished the state apparatus.

Let's not forget the Axis of Evil speech where he threatened pre-emptive strikes against Iran and North Korea. Iran hated Saddam and the Taliban, Bush lumped them all together in the anti-US camp. He effectively told Iran 'make our Iraq experience as disastrous as possible or you're the next target'. North Korea nuclearized and went on to cause more headaches for Washington.

Let's not forget the Axis of Evil speech...

I remember bien-pensants comparing the Axis of Evil speech to Reagan's Evil Empire speech at the time, and thinking they were even stupider than Bush. The point about the Evil Empire speech was that the Soviet Union was both evil and an empire, but there was a legitimate argument about whether the leader of the free world shouting this from the rooftops was a good idea with nukes involved. The point about the Axis of Evil speech was that Iran, Iraq and North Korea were not an axis, and thinking they were should disqualify you from national security policymaking roles. But to treat both speeches primarily as examples of provocative American jingoism is to indicate that you don't care about the truth values of statements.

North Vietnamese, during the Vietnam war, also famously tortured American PoWs, yet they won their civil war.

You provide a link to an example of an American PoW who was tortured into doing propaganda broadcasts for the North Vietnamese (John McCain was another). This is a minor variation on torturing someone to give a false confession. You do not provide examples of American PoWs tortured into giving up actionable intelligence, because there is no evidence that it happened. This is unsurprising - NATO doctrine on intelligence investigations is that a sufficiently large percentage of PoWs will give up the goods for a hot meal and a cigarette that you have to assume anything a PoW knows is compromised and plan accordingly, so we would not expect to see evidence either way.

You attacked US torture programme, merely by the result of the war, without proving that the programme was ineffective. It thus seems fair to defend the North Vietnamese torture by only showing that they won, not proving that it helped.

In any case, in both cases whether actionable information was obtained, is probably classified.

Fine, a CIA operative was kidnapped, soon after undercover agents that he knew were killed.

Thanks. Someone who has been tortured to the point where

Buckley was close to a gibbering wretch. His words were often incoherent; he slobbered and drooled and, most unnerving of all, he would suddenly scream in terror, his eyes rolling helplessly and his body shaking.

is obviously limited in the value of the intel they can provide, but getting them to name names worked for Hezbollah. I genuinely don't know how Hezbollah avoided the problem of continuing to get useless names after the victim has run out of useful ones - this was a major problem for the US in Afghanistan, to the point where the CIA torturing Al Qaeda captives to name names appears to have ended up being a net negative.

In any case, in both cases whether actionable information was obtained, is probably classified.

Unusually, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence declassified a summary of their report into the CIA torture programme, coming to the conclusion that

The CIA's use of its enhanced interrogation techniques was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation from detainees.

and providing an unclassified overview of the detailed evidence present in the full, classified report. The CIA's internal report into the torture programme (the "Panetta Review") apparently comes to the same conclusion.

The ball was moved from "torturing people for information" to "torturing random people for random facts."

We can decide "we will not torture even though it works." That is a principle.

"We do not torture it does not work anyway" is a Just World Fallacy.

That would be evidence that humans achieve something by torture. However, that something is not necessarily the exact information that is needed.

In pre-industrial Western countries, use of torture was often doctrinal to obtain not information, but confessions of heresy for the sake of the soul of the guilty. It was quite popular and quite widely applied! Then many death penalties also involved torture, because, uh, reasons? Whatever the reason was, it wasn't just 18th century French, the Romans also had reasons for torturous punishments (ditto for Hammurabi).

I wouldn't simply shrug off the possibility that yes, humans quite like torturing and killing other humans for "fun", and rationalize it. It likely has some reason, maybe something to do with warfare and establishing a domination hierarchy (but which is not necessarily the same reason humans say to themselves).

Speaking of military intelligence, I thought the oldest and most reliable way (even today) to obtain enemy's secrets is to pay agents with money and luxuries. Or that is what Sun Tzu suggests.

The enemy’s spies who have come to spy on us must be sought out,760 tempted with bribes, led away and comfortably housed.761 Thus they will become converted spies and available for our service.

It is through the information brought by the converted spy that we are able to acquire and employ local and inward spies.762

It is owing to his information, again, that we can cause the doomed spy to carry false tidings to the enemy.763

Lastly, it is by his information that the surviving spy can be used on appointed occasions.764

The end and aim of spying in all its five varieties is knowledge of the enemy;765 and this knowledge can only be derived, in the first instance, from the converted spy.766 Hence it is essential that the converted spy be treated with the utmost liberality.

Art of War, Ch 13, Giles Translation

There are Goodhart's law problems with historical torture. Regardless of its usefulness at extracting information, torture has always been excellent at extracting confessions. So any organization rewarded based on confessed criminals/spies/traitors caught will find torture very effective, regardless of how little it actually serves their purported goal.

For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun.

So sacrificing food and other resources to gods that there is no evidence for is not wasted time and resources that has been done for millenniums? All of the superstitions that people use to have that where disproved by science in one form another makes them valid again, because they were practiced for longer than it has been disproved.

There is a difference to say that torture doesn't work as interrogation tool compared to informing your enemy of your callousness so they fear you. I never claimed that torture was totally useless, I only claimed that it usefulness was limited for the innocent and the well motivated trained individual! But torture as a tool to strike fear in your enemy it might be effective.

Religious ceremonies did have strong positive effects. It’s much easiest to control a civilization if the people believe you are a sun god. Even non religious civs built monuments etc.

Yes if some traditions have practical benefits it doesn't mean that all do. There are things done within companies that are superfluous that nobody knows why they are done, yet they are ingrained in the company culture that nobody dares to remove them. So why wouldn't that be in cultures that are much older? Not everything superfluous is removed from company culture and therefore it is likely that superfluous rituals stays in civilizational cultures that are usually much older!

So sacrificing food and other resources to gods that there is no evidence for is not wasted time and resources that has been done for millenniums? All of the superstitions that people use to have that where disproved by science in one form another makes them valid again, because they were practiced for longer than it has been disproved.

They very clearly were not useless. Such rituals granted legitimacy to kings, united the people for whom they were performed, and often gave those people the "why" they needed in order to suffer through the current "how." It doesn't matter that gods are not actually eating the food. If these rituals had truly been stupid and pointless they would have quickly died out and been replaced by something that wasn't.

Other people in this thread are making comments about the Drug War and other failed government programs. Similarly, there is a vast bureaucratic behemoth that benefits from the Drug War continuing. Whole areas of law with specialized lawyers, myriad government task forces and agencies, lots of police work to be done, lots of political points to be scored by being "tough on drugs." The Drug War is a waste of resources if you only measure it's efficacy at keeping drugs out of the hands of Americans. But as a self-licking ice cream cone it's a highly effective.

They very clearly were not useless.

See, I would've said that they very clearly were useless. So I guess the moral for both of us is: it's not actually very clear in either direction.

But it's also fairly effective at its core job if you consider how much more available drugs would be without any kind of war on them.

Similarly, there is a vast bureaucratic behemoth that benefits from the Drug War continuing. Whole areas of law with specialized lawyers, myriad government task forces and agencies, lots of police work to be done, lots of political points to be scored by being "tough on drugs." The Drug War is a waste of resources if you only measure it's efficacy at keeping drugs out of the hands of Americans. But as a self-licking ice cream cone it's a highly effective.

This is the point I'm partly trying to make with the cancellation. Beneath the surface is that the "war on terror" is that the "establishment" (I have no better word for it) doesn't have an incentive for telling the story of the "redemption". So there critique of that the creator isn't the right skin color to tell the story of these people trying to reform themselves is not called out by the "establishment media" as bullshit because it would be against the lucrative paymasters interest to tell a different story of terrorists as misguided human beings.

For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun.

Same could be said of augury and, for that matter, all sorts of political and military configurations that aren't about metaphysics (how's the Drug War going?).

The answer there is often to just bite the bullet: either they were just "stupid" or they were getting some sort of fringe benefit separate from actual divine signs (psychological comfort, political cover, social buy-in).

But I kind of agree: "torture doesn't work" can't really be defended in its most literal sense. I mean: it works some of the time, obviously. But the anti-side never say that in the West.

The most charitable way I can read it is "torture as a practice doesn't work - as in produce better results than alternatives on the whole. So torturing that guy when you have as much intelligence as possible and so can tell when they're lying can still be highly effective, even if the torture of much more dubious cases (perhaps the bulk) of mere suspects may not be. After all: if torture were institutionalized it would involve a lot of such people.

Which I think is similar to the argument against corporal punishment: surely it works as deterrent to beat a child sometimes. The argument is that it's bad on the whole (I'm personally agnostic on both of these).

Augury was very useful.

Surprise is extremely effective in warfare, and if the hour you're going to attack is based on augury, then your enemy has no way of predicting it.

If you attack based on an objective judgement of when the conditions are most favourable to your side, aka babby's first campaign, you will quickly find your movements anticipated and hard-countered by your opponent, who was able to predict your movements based on exactly the same objective signs.

Conversely if you attack because the chicken bone pointed towards the Death card, then your opponent will never see that one coming.

This only applies to situations where there are multiple valid ways or timings to proceed and augury can help you to randomly pick one. In other cases, augury might commit you to pointless or even disastrous decisions. Consider this example from the Anabasis (this is quite late in the book where the Greek army had already reached the Hellenized parts of modern northwestern Turkey):

Thereupon the generals sacrificed, in the presence of the Arcadian seer, Arexion; for Silanus the Ambraciot had chartered a vessel at Heraclea and made his escape ere this. Sacrificing with a view to departure, the victims proved unfavourable to them. Accordingly they waited that day. Certain people were bold enough to say that Xenophon, out of his desire to colonise the place, had persuaded the seer to say that the victims were unfavourable to departure. Consequently he proclaimed by herald next morning that any one who liked should be present at the sacrifice; or if he were a seer he was bidden to be present and help to inspect the victims. Then he sacrificed, and there were numbers present; but though the sacrifice on the question of departure was repeated as many as three times, the victims were persistently unfavourable. Thereat the soldiers were in high dudgeon, for the provisions they had brought with them had reached the lowest ebb, and there was no market to be had.

This scene also happened while at the exact midway point between two Greek cities in the territory of a hostile Anatolian tribe. A little while later a scouting party is attacked and almost wiped out by hostile cavalry that had time to arrive in the time the army sat around idle. It's only after the supply of sacrificial animals runs out and oxen pulling the wagons have to be used instead that finally the signs are favourable.

I tried to qualify it in my post the limited usefulness of torture to gather timely and accurate information from 1. innocent people who are not motivated and trained, so they will make shit up to avoid the torture. 2. Well trained and motivated "enemy combatant" that will mislead you deliberately and feigning that he might have "cracked" and telling truths. But as I wrote in the other reply it doesn't preclude other benefits of torture like spreading fear or gaining assets from the less motivated enemies.

Same could be said of augury and, for that matter, all sorts of political and military configurations that aren't about metaphysics (how's the Drug War going?).

As far as I know all dictatorships use some method of torture to this day. We are also talking about highly "successful" regimes - if one counts staying in power as success - like that of North Korea. I'd say these people would have much more systematic evidence of efficacy of modern torture compared to US or other Western countries with much more red tape around these practices with deep incentives to hide the existence of torture even if it was succesful.

So torturing that guy when you have as much intelligence as possible and so can tell when they're lying can still be highly effective

I'd say that this may be the most effective way of using torture. You can ask easily verifiable information such as where is the weapon cache hidden or what is the cipher for coded message or maybe just verify other intel possibly also gathered by torture. But even thinking about it logically - what other option is there? I know that British during WW2 were inventive and gathered some intelligence by creating bugged comfy house for German officers, supplying them with steady stream of booze and then recording what they said in unguarded moments. There may also be bribes or blackmail and such - but if none of these investigative methods yield any results what else is there from investigative standpoint? Release them? Even modern western investigators use threat of what to me accounts like torture (e.g. threat of longer prison sentence or being sent into hostile prison and so forth) to get something from criminals. Sometimes investigators may even return to prison and offer deals of shortening the sentence - basically ending the torture - in order to get some intel.

Now obviously I am not even some proponent of torture, but for moral reasons and of course overall impact on society and all that. But just saying that torture is not effective seems a bit hasty conclusion at best. And to be sure lately I am even less inclined to believe any academic research especially if some deeply held political or moral stances are at stake, which BTW also includes spanking.

For me it is hard to believe that people were so stupid for such a long time and wasted time and resources doing it just for fun.

You may be underestimating just how much people enjoy cruelty.

You may be underestimating just how much people enjoy cruelty.

I can absolutely imagine torturing certain people just for fun. The list of names is long, and not suitable for discussion on this forum.

I suggest you keep in mind Evil Overlord List item #4 if you ever get the chance.

I suggest you keep in mind Evil Overlord List item #4 if you ever get the chance.

I lack the grit and work ethic needed to be an effective evil overlord, but thanks for the advice. My wife is currently working on an SF novel with an evil overlord inspired by me, but who is able to make up for the work ethic with an Elon Musk level IQ and mild psychic powers.

Maybe I'm sheltered but I think it's hard to find people who'd be okay with spending all day sticking splinters under defenseless, terrified prisoners' nails or whatever. It takes a morally deformed person to do that day in day out and enjoy it. I suppose if you have a large enough group of people you'll always find some one like that, but pre modern people didn't always have such large groups.

You don't have to be morally deformed when you torture the first prisoner. You just need to believe that this time there really is the ticking bomb in the school, and that you are being morally serious and avoiding Just World fallacy and all the other things torture apologists have said on this very thread. So you hold your nose and turn the handle.

Then you hear the screams. The screams of the hated, defeated enemy. It feels good. An better still, he screamed a name. You got actionable intelligence - you did the right thing. (You don't know at that point that he gave the same name to the FBI in exchange for coffee and a hot meal three weeks ago). And you did this. You had to overcome your fear of the tofu-eating wokists of North London to do the right thing. Actually, you're kind of a hero. The sense of power is good for the ego too. Your testosterone levels go through the roof. The sex with your wife that night is special.

They bring the guy he named in. The second time is easier. You get another name. But perhaps he is holding back - he is supposed to be the higher-up after all. So you arrange another session. Nobody broke after only one round of torture in the old books, after all.

The third time is even easier. You tell him he needs to name names to make the torture stop. In between the cries, you get name after name.

They bring those people in. You start to realise that they don't talk as easily. They must be particularly hard cases - you have hard evidence that they are baddies, after all. The second guy said so under torture, and if he was lying you would have put him through another session, and he wouldn't want that. You don't consider the possibility that they aren't talking is that they weren't baddies and don't know anything. It would mean you are out of a lucrative job. So you dial up the pain.

Two days later you hear that one of the guys you left in the cold cell overnight died of hypothermia. Can't make an omlette without breaking eggs, after all. But you aren't morally deformed. You are just doing a difficult, unpleasant job that most people are too prissy to do. And you have also tortured an innocent man to death.

You have also booked a one-way ticket to the eight circle of Hell and your family is accursed down to the thirteenth generation.

avoiding Just World fallacy and all the other things torture apologists have said on this very thread

Hey. Asshole.

I think it is good to avoid torture. It is an excellent thing to do.

Do not do it from a position of lies, especially putting lies in my mouth.

There's a short story by the horror writer John Langan called "In Paris, In the Mouth of Kronos" and it involves ex-soldiers who have been tried and convicted for the kinds of Abu Ghraib misconduct, and worse. There's a way of getting into that mindset:

After that, it had been learning the restraints that would cause the prisoner maximum discomfort, expose him (or occasionally, her) to optimum harm. It was hoisting the prisoner off the ground first without dislocating his shoulders, then with. Waterboarding, yes, together with the repurposing of all manner of daily objects, from nail files to pliers to dental floss. Each case was different. Of course you couldn’t believe any of the things the prisoners said when they were turned over to you, their protestations of innocence. But even after it appeared you’d broken them, you couldn’t be sure they weren’t engaged in a more subtle deception, acting as if you’d succeeded in order to preserve the truly valuable information. For this reason, it was necessary to keep the interrogation open, to continue to revisit those prisoners who swore they’d told you everything they knew. These people are not like you and me, Just-Call-Me-Bill had said, confirming the impression that had dogged Vasquez when she’d walked patrol, past women draped in white or slate burqas, men whose pokool proclaimed their loyalty to the mujahideen. These are not a reasonable people. You cannot sit down and talk to them, Bill went on, come to an understanding with them. They would rather fly an airplane into a building full of innocent women and men. They would rather strap a bomb to their daughter and send her to give you a hug. They get their hands on a nuke, and there’ll be a mushroom cloud where Manhattan used to be. What they understand is pain. Enough suffering, and their tongues will loosen.

Vasquez had learned that her father’s stories of the Villa Grimaldi—which he had withheld from her until she was fifteen, when over the course of the evening after her birthday she had been first incredulous, then horrified, then filled with righteous fury on his behalf—had little bearing on her duties in the Closet. Her father had been an innocent man, a poet, for God’s sake, picked up by Pinochet’s Caravana de la Muerte because they were engaged in a program of terrorizing their own populace. The men (and occasional women) at whose interrogations she assisted were terrorists themselves, spiritual kin to the officers who had scarred her father’s arms, his chest, his back, his thighs, who had scored his mind with nightmares from which he still woke screaming, decades later. They were not like you and me, and that difference authorized and legitimized whatever was required to start them talking.

Spending all day is cruel, executioners should unionize and limit it to 8-hour work shifts.

...

They probably got paid, and maybe even explained why their work is important.

"Maybe I'm sheltered but I think it's hard to find people who'd be okay with spending all day sticking splinters under defenseless, terrified prisoners' nails or whatever. It takes a morally deformed person to do that day in day out and enjoy it."

You're absolutely correct. Unfortunately, however, there are a depressing number of morally deformed people in this world (both now and historically).

Pre-modern life, with its constant wars, famines and other horrors, would have surely resulted in a greater proportion of morally deformed people.