Torture’s Fallacies — and Criminality

from Consortium News:



Torture’s Fallacies — and Criminality
December 19, 2014

In America’s fascination with fictional entertainment, torture has been a popular plot device as some tough-guy “hero” extracts a clue from a hardened “bad guy,” most famously with Jack Bauer in “24.” But real-world torture elicits false information – and is a grave crime of state, as Lawrence Davidson explains.

By Lawrence Davidson


It has long been known that torture does not work. One can go back to the Age of Enlightenment. In 1764, Cesare Beccaria published his groundbreaking work, On Crimes and Punishments, in which he examined all the evidence available at that time and concluded that individuals under torture will tell their interrogators anything they want to hear, true or not, just to get the pain to stop. Beccaria’s book led to a temporary waning of the state-ordered torture.

Nonetheless, the United States has used torture repeatedly. Indeed, the Senate Intelligence Committee’s release of its report (five years in the making) on the George W. Bush administration’s use of torture testifies to only the most recent in a long line of such incidents.

For instance, torture was used against prisoners during and immediately following the Spanish-American War, particularly in the Philippines. More recently, the U.S. (and its adversary) used torture during the Vietnam War. Confirming Beccaria’s judgment, the consensus among U.S. military personnel, who examined the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” (the latest euphemism for torture) against Viet Cong and North Vietnamese prisoners, was that it did not work.

This conclusion has been supported by Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, who was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam for over five years. He has repeatedly said that he knows, from personal experience, that “victims of torture will offer intentionally misleading information if they think their captors will believe it.” ..................(more)

The complete piece is at: https://consortiumnews.com/2014/12/19/tortures-fallacies-and-criminality/