Infected Mushroom wrote:I don't recommend using torture to extract confessions.
If you're trying to extract time-sensitive information, you need to make a cost-benefit calculation and decide who is worth interrogating and who is not. If done economically and strategically, it can be a good tool for getting the information you need (its superior to just randomly sending out your agents on a completely random goose chase in the alternative).
Oh, but why shouldn't we use torture to extract confessions? Aren't you the one saying that if a guilty party were brought in and tortured they would eventually confess guilt, that by the virtues of good common sense and human nature only a small minority of the truly guilty would ever withhold confessions of guilt if tortured? Isn't that exactly what you've been saying, only applied to police departments instead of intelligence agencies? Why shouldn't police departments use torture strategically and economically so as to save themselves time and resources that could be better put to investigating and capturing the next violent criminal? Aren't you the one saying that torture can spare people wild goose chases under time-sensitive circumstances?
Could it perhaps be that the information extracted by police departments from torture programmes wouldn't be meaningful or reliable? That there would be a lot of noise blocking out the signal as people confessed irrespective of guilt in order to cease the torment, even if only temporarily? Think about where else this sort of reasoning could apply. Where else it has been empirically shown to apply.
