Here's the link to the article.
And here are my points and comments.
Point 1 : "The crucial point, though, is that even the communists suspected that torture can't be relied on to produce more than false confessions--because people will say anything to make the pain stop."
I do not entirely agree to this point. It is true though that people will say anything to make the pain stop. However, what they say will have to be consistent with what the interrogators ask for. Lying is counter-productive when truth is found out. The suspect will only draw more punishments to himself that way. Furthermore, we need to understand the situation in an interrogation room. It is not a conducive environment to cook up some stories to alleviate the pain. The suspect will not be able to focus for long as he or she is being subjected to the pain. There has been researches into how people lie and the results of these studies shows that lying takes more effort than to speak the truth. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that it will be unlikely that the suspect can come up with an impromptu lie to stop the interrogation process. However, this point may be true if the suspect or suspects have collaborated beforehand to tell the same false confessions in the event that they are captured and interrogated. In this case, the confessions will have to be crossed check with other independent sources in order to establish the legitimacy of the confessions. Also, there are interrogation methods that aims to limit the possibility that the suspect may come up with a false confession. Known colloquially as the Good cop/Bad cop routine, it aims to help the suspect relate better to the "good cop" and thus facilitate the interrogation process.
Point 2: "Valuable stuff, but stuff that could have been extracted through patient and relentless persuasion."
In this situation, the type of information gathered will have to be taken into account. In order to justify the use of "patient and relentless persuasion", assuming that it does works, we need to know how critical the information is. If the information is about an imminent attack, aggressive interrogations would be suitable to extract the information in time. However if the information is not in need of immediate attention, then patience and persuasion may be used instead. The tricky parts to this is assessing the potential importance of the information gathered. The interrogators have few ways to determine the quality of information that the suspect possess. One way is through the status or rank of the suspect. If he or she is a high ranking individual, one can say that they probably will have some valuable information. On the other hand, if the suspect happens to be a low ranking personnel, then it is reasonable to expect that they do not possess much valuable information. The statement that the author made was done assuming that the suspect will eventually be persuaded. However, I would like to question the feasibility of that scenario. Furthermore, the military and defense sector is a result oriented entity. The time given to extract the information from the suspect is very limited. The author has left out the possibility that the interrogation, using patience and persuasion, may take too long such that even though the information may have been extracted but it may be outdated already.
Point 3 : "The use of torture has come at huge costs to American credibility and the morale and psychology of our intelligence agencies."
This point is true, but only from a certain viewpoint. From the viewpoint of the United States, the potential significance of the information garnered certainly has justified the use of torture as an interrogation technique. The problem is that most of the people do not see the complete picture. In the scenario that the government had banned aggressive interrogations, assuming that the agencies do follow the rules, and there was an incident. The people would question why had the government not use more force when extracting the information. Ultimately, this is a utilitarian move. By sacrificing the suspect, the society can be better off. The author should have looked into the scenario whereby the government did not use torture. That way, it will be clear that using torture is the least evil of all the choices that are present. Furthermore, the author will have to clarify if such incidences had really dent the morale and psychology of the intelligence agencies. Such incidences would only have sharpen their focus and force them to work harder to justify their actions.
In these type of arguments, the author do not often account for the fact that there are times where the use of force is necessary. Reality is dirty. No matter how much we can try to built society such that it is as ideal as possible, there will always be times where we are forced to take less than ideal measures so that the rest of the society can be safer. By assuming that your enemy will play to the rules, that is just being naive. And naive people can not be good leaders.
