Torture, if it is in fact a part of an interrogation process and not being carried out just for kicks and the sweet, sweet smell of piss and fear, is not effective if applied by the actual interrogator. Tyler Cowen’s thought experiment assumes that the people hurting you want you to talk. In fact, they don’t. They don’t care what you say. Intelligence isn’t their job. Destroying bits and pieces of your body, fracturing your sense of self, making you grateful for lesser circles of Hell is their job.
Once you are in his hands, there is nothing you can say to the man with the brass knuckles, the wire, the blank stare. Once you are already there, it’s too late to avoid the rubber hose. You will be beaten. You will be broken.
Where torture is possible, you have to do everything you can to avoid its back rooms. Everything. And the only way to avoid the constant blazing light, the cold cement room, the shit stained chair is to put someone else in it. Your neighbor, your friend, your brother, your wife, your child.
. . .
Torture is never about intelligence. The frame of gathering information, the asking of questions simply allows the guards, the interrogators, the torturers, the officers, the ministers, the presidents to sleep at night. Tomorrow, they think as they sink into their pillows and snuggle closer to the warmth of their partners, tomorrow we'll get some answers. But knowledge is never certain or complete, the job is never, ever done.
Torture is always about trust. Society is only possible when people trust one another, when people agree upon the rules, when people are not afraid of their neighbors, when people gather together to build a better a world. If everybody is trying to stay out of the gulag, if everybody is desperate to fill the prison’s perpetually empty rooms with someone else’s body, organization is impossible. Society withers, civilization crumbles, humanity withdraws, and the desert of loneliness smothers all human feeling.
. . .
UPDATE: Perhaps the title to this post is a wee bit abstruse: the way to avoid torture is to NOT torture, dammit!
Posted by Martial