Originally Posted by
Derah
This is a fallacious argument.
If that was true, diet pill companies would have gone bankrupt years ago. Their fucking pills don't work, you wanna lose weight? Go on a diet, and do some excercise. Swallowing a magic pill is not gonna turn you into a super-model. Magic pills that let you eat like a pig, but still look like a greek statue DON'T work, but people still buy them by the bucketloads.
For hundreds of years, ancient tribes believed that eating the hearts and balls of your enemies would make you stronger. It didn't work but that didn't stop thousands of tribes from all parts of the globe from trying it at one point or another.
For decades it was thought that if you ask an undercover police officer if they are a cop, they're obligated to tell you. Its not true, but believe it or not, people STILL attempt to do this when soliciting sex or drugs from undercover agents, believing that they're perfectly safe so long as they ask first "are you a cop?". Hundreds of thousands of people arrested, and people STILL believe this shit works.
For almost 200 years people have believed that searing the meat "seals in the juices" creating better, softer, moister meat. Wait, you think that searing a steak magically makes it impermeable? No, what actually happens is that the Maillard reaction creates the brown crust which is just really fucking delicious, and makes it taste better. That's it. Doesn't stop people from still yammering about searing their steaks because they want them nice and juicy...... then they overcook them and they have to eat a dried piece of crap.
I could list you examples all day, but the bottom line is: Throughout history, people have tried INNUMERABLE amounts of things because they think they work. Even when shown irrefutable evidence that they don't, they still try it, why? Because humans are stubborn, and stupid.
But mostly stupid.
What would be more effective? A method that works 1 out of 100 times, and only saves 1 life? OR a method that works 9 out of 10 times, and saves thousands of lives?
Torturing is just an excuse of violent people to indulge on their violent urges. It has nothing to do with information gathering.
Science has proven times beyond counting that information obtained during duress is unreliable information. Specially if it comes from radicalist terrorists. Dude, they don't give a shit about their own lives. They're willing to blow themselves up for a cause. You seriously think they give two fucks about the pain you can inflict on them?
Here's a dosage of reality for ya: In Real Life, as an interrogation technique for extracting actual usable intelligence, its efficacy varies wildly: Under torture, some will tell the truth, others will lie just to spite their torturers, others will clam up under poor treatment, and still others will say ANYTHING to make the torture stop. This last is a major problem with torture; it is a well-known means to extract false confessions from people, being frequently used for such purposes, and as such any intelligence gathered in this way is highly unreliable, doubly so because the torture victim will often be playing directly into what they believe that their torturer WANTS them to say. There are also cases where the victims tells the truth but the torture continues anyway because their tormentors don't believe them... until, of course, they come up with a convincing lie... just to make the pain stop.