Hacker News Reader

Comment by harryf | Hacker News Reader

That torture doesn't work to extract information has been known anecdotally at least since the 2nd world war - read up on Hans Scharf - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanns_Scharff

But tortute does work when your goal is oppressing large populations; instilling fear and control. This is the discussion the US ought to be having... what wa the real policy behind torture?

View on HN

Yes. If CIA would actually worry about the terrorist, then the terrorists still free would be 1. concern. They are really hard to catch, no matter how you try.

Now if you go torture route, you might get some information that is quickly getting dated. But you also validate the terrorist cause. And terrorists in hostage situations don't want to surrender, because they know they will be tortured.

If you would treat captured terrorists incredibly nicely, that would cause huge moral decay and risk of snitching to the terrorists who are still free. This is in line with Sun Tzu from few thousand years back "always reward a traitor, never trust him". Also U.S. domestic terrorism called "mafia" was best fought with witness protection program.

CIA isn't stupid. They do torture for some reason.

I think you unknowingly answered the real question: what is the purpose of torture? Almost everyone here is assuming it is to extract information and save lives with that information, but I would venture to say that is not nearly as often the case as most would like to think.

If we look at the other possible reasons, some things make sense. One thing to keep in mind is that torture is rare. The majority who end up at places like Gitmo don't get tortured (treated badly, yes, but rarely tortured). The real people who get tortured are much more likely to be at a blacksite no one knows about.

There is an interesting pattern though, I have noticed, which is the turning of targets into double agents and releasing them back in the wild.

Now, another thing to remember is The Company started MKUltra a long time ago. They have surely highly improved the mental breakdown/buildup process since then. If you stop assuming the purpose of torture is to gather information, things will make much more sense.

Also, like you said: "you validate the terrorist cause". What a useful side effect for those who seem to be invested in destabilizing certain areas of the world...

I think that's good speculation. But with bit of Hanlons Razor, that seems bit too good picture of CIA. They are not stupid, but they are still a fallible organization.

I think their priorities are: existence of CIA, genuine concern for safety of U.S., geopolitical power of U.S.

Maybe they we're really clueless. And decided to waterboard people so they would be "doing something" so they could try to justify existence of CIA. Or maybe they wanted to show to Mossad that they get to do shit too. As an intelligence saber rattling. We really don't know.

Not long before 9/11, a friend of mine went through SERE training. He said the main purpose of the torture techniques they used wasn't to gain information, but to make the captive say whatever the captors wished.

Then all this torture stuff came up and lo and behold, they used those same techniques from SERE (at least, what's publicly known about them), and the "information" they came up with said there were WMDs in Iraq.

(Of course, this wasn't necessarily an unintentional falsehood. It could just be that high command said "get us information on WMDs in Iraq," and special forces soldiers who'd been through SERE used the techniques they knew.)

When and where was torture used to generate theories about WMD in Iraq?

afaik it was based on the well established fact that Saddam Hussein had once possessed and used WMDs, cynicism about his stated destruction of them and circumstantial evidence that certain facilities might have still contained them.

I always remeber the line, " How did we know Saddam had wmd? Because we had the receipts!"

From a quick google, it appears I misremembered somewhat. Torture evidence was used to build the case for war with Iraq, but it was about Iraq's relationship with Al Qaida, not the existence of WMDs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_al-Shaykh_al-Libi

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/05/14/iraq.torture/index.ht...

"preying upon his prisoner's fears of the infamous Gestapo". Would you say then that torture (of other people) eventually played a role in the effectiveness of his technique ?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com