re: #28 calochortus

What is the evidence that torture produces results? That is exactly the sort of study I was asking for.

You assume it works because people use torture. People use torture because they assume it works. If it does, there should be evidence. The fact that a tortured person will sometimes tell you what you want to know is not evidence of torture’s effectiveness unless you can show that it equals or outperforms other methods of obtaining intelligence.

I think it’s a safe assumption that the Government, police, military and spy agencies have been collecting information on interrogation techniques for a very long time. Not just from our own interrogations but also from debriefing our own soldiers who have been captured and interrogated. Which techniques work, which ones don’t work. When people broke, how they resisted, what info they gave up or held back, etc. Not all interrogations go perfectly but they have a pretty good idea what works and what doesn’t. The goal is to get the most and best quality information they can and it’s a mistake to assume they intentionally use techniques just to be mean and vengeful which don’t result in good intelligence.