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Notes -
I very much agree with his assertion in the second article that analysts often try to avoid mentioning (or even thinking about) tradeoffs in political discussions, even that's almost always how the real world works. Being honest about tradeoffs is a good strategy for correctly comprehending the world, but not for "winning" arguments.
Somewhat related to the civil rights violations of prisoners, I remember the arguments about Guantanamo back in the War on Terror days. It was common to hear politicians and pundits - in full seriousness - make the claim that "torture doesn't work anyway." I hated the fact that, post-9/11, it was politically impossible to say "torture is against our values, so we won't do it even though this makes our anti-terror efforts less effective and costs lives." Despite the fact that (I suspect) most people would agree privately with this statement...
The context I always got for "torture doesn't work" was that, while torture works great to get an insurgent to confess that his neighbor is also part of the insurgency, torture is great at eliciting that confession whether it's true or not. If you're lucky you get to parade the neighbor's IED cache out in front of the neighborhood and you have 1 fewer insurgent; if you're unlucky you have to let the suffering neighbor go and you still might have pissed off his further neighbors and cousins and so forth sufficiently to have 5 more insurgents.
Thus everyone had to go to the "ticking time bomb" thought experiment to get a real ethical conundrum: if the tortured suspect is being asked for information where a lie won't hurt any (more) innocents and won't radicalize any more enemies and will be quickly and reliably discovered, then we have to determine whether our values are really enough to say "no".
I think your hypothetical scenarios are a little mixed up. You mention confessions in your first case, because (yes, of course) confessions gained under torture aren't legitimate. Which has nothing to do with the War on Terror argument, or the second part where you mention finding an IED cache. That's information gathering, and that's the general case.
Note that:
All information you get from a suspect, voluntary, coerced, or via torture, is potentially a lie. Pretending that torture is different in this way is special pleading.
You invented a highly contrived scenario to show the worst-case consequences of believing a lie. There are dozens of ways of checking and acting on information that are less vivid.
The main difference that torture has is there are some suspects for which it is the only way of getting useful information. It sucks, but this is the Universe we live in.
As for the "ticking time bomb" thought experiment, that's not highlighting one special example where torture works. That's just showing where the torture-vs-not distinction (the ethical conundrum, like you said) becomes sharpest. Most people have some threshold X at which saving X lives is worth torturing one person. It arguably shouldn't make a difference whether those lives are direct (a bomb in a city) or indirect (stopping a huge attack 2 years down the line), but we're human, so it does.
Flawed reasoning - the point being made is that using torture leads to a much greater rate of false positives, because when you torture people until they tell you what you want to hear they will frequently tell you what you want to hear in order to make the torture stop, even if they have to make up what you want to hear.
Are you going to really claim that a confession from someone who rats out their conspirators in order to secure a favourable plea deal is equally as reliable as the fruits of a torture chamber?
I'll just point out that you - not me - used the phrase "what you want to hear". Note that "what you want to hear" most is useful information. Please, you're on The Motte, just try to think logically about this rather than believing what you really hope to be true.
Just off the top of my head, suppose you have 5 suspects and you need the address of their base, and they're not talking. You torture them and they give you some addresses. Do you say "welp, a lot of these are false positives, shucks, into the garbage with you"? No, of course not. You can surveil all the addresses, you can correlate their stories, you can torture them more if it doesn't match up, etc. I'm making up an armchair scenario which doesn't come close to capturing the complexity of real-world intelligence work, but that's ok, because I'm not the one trying to make a sweeping claim. All it takes is one situation where torture works for your motivated reasoning to fall apart.
I'm sorry, but torture is a horrible practice that we shouldn't do, but it also works. It just does. If I had info I didn't want to reveal, it would work on me. It would work on you. This isn't a political question. It's a simple fact, and it's one that the average person just knows, because they haven't heard the "clever" contrarian arguments that let you talk yourself out of common sense.
You need to finish reading the sentence - "even if they have to make up what you want to hear". Interrogators do not have magical powers that can let them determine if information is useful or just useful-sounding. I have no doubt that a committed torturer could extract any kind of confession they wanted from me, even ones that aren't true. That's the entire problem with torture - you get an immense false positive rate that causes big problems for the reliability of information. Even your own hypothetical armchair scenario shows the flaw - if only one of your five suspects actually knows the location of the base or bomb that they've planted and the rest have to make it up, torture is worse than useless if you have any sort of time pressure or resource constraints.
Go back and point out the "motivated reasoning" in my post, and make sure that this reasoning would fall apart with a single potential counterexample - because I couldn't find that argument in my post. My actual point is that torture is a technique with limited effectiveness due to a high false positive rate, and your argument that you can account for a high rate of false positives by spending time and resources investigating them does not even rise to the level of a refutation of my point. Yes, if you spend more resources you can account for the problems of torture, but the fact that these problems can be compensated for with time and money does not mean that they do not exist. When you look at it in the context of modern intelligence-gathering capabilities, torture is so far down the list of effectiveness that it is barely even worth talking about. We live in surveillance states that engage in deep and sophisticated algorithmic profiling of every single citizen and a lot of them have live video monitoring of important places. It is largely impossible to engage in commercial transactions at scale without drawing the interest and attention of those surveillance bodies, and if we're going to say "fuck Civil Liberties, maximal effectiveness now" I highly doubt any torture would actually take place due to the impossibility of keeping enough information secret from the panopticon that has been constructed around us for it to even be worthwhile.
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