by Jesse Card

Created on: January 14, 2010   Last Updated: January 16, 2010

Torture does not work: it never has and it never will. Yes, there are some cases in recent and ancient history where valuable information was received from victims of torture, but if anything was learned from the inquisitions, witch trials, and more recently, the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi it is that torture almost always produces false confessions and information derived from them can lead to tragic consequences. 

Even Senator McCain, who was tortured, is against the use of torture as a mechanism for obtaining intelligence information.

Roger Koppl, in his article “Epistemic Systems”, makes a great case against torture from the standpoint of its plausibility, rather than the moral or emotional standpoint from which this is often argued. 

Koppl argues that two things must exist for torture to work: 1) the party torturing must be able to know the truth when the victim gives it and 2) the victim must know of a certainty that the torture will stop once the truth is provided. The problem with the first part is that if the torturer knew the truth, there would be no reason to torture. 

For the second part, the victim - who, especially in the case of terrorists, likely distrusts and dislikes the U.S. in the first place - has no way to trust what the torturer promises.

This second fact was also known to Hanns Scharff, whose techniques of interrogating U.S. pilots in World War II, likely had more influence on modern U.S. interrogation training than any other.  Scharff made expert use of elicitation techniques which often provided him information about U.S. plans and aircraft without the prisoner knowing. 

Scharff spent countless hours talking to the prisoners, even taking them for walks, to receive just one small piece of information. He built trust with his prisoners to such an extent that if he told them he was going to do something, or stop doing it, they would actually believe him.

There is one problem with Scharff’s method: it takes a long time. So, proponents of torture will argue that, in cases where information that could save many lives with information regarding an attack within the near future, torture is an effective means of gathering intelligence, and is morally permissible because only one person must suffer some pain to save the lives of many. 

Even in this case, however, the problems addressed by Koppl still exist. The first problem of truth is even more applicable because the

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>