torture

Does torture work?

Depends on how you define your terms, especially "work".

If what you want is to extract information from a person, and you torture them to acquire it, then no, it doesn't work. You get everything you want to hear, a bunch of stuff he thought you might want to hear, and a bunch of random guesses thinking the pain might be stopped long enough for his made-up story to be checked out. So, no, the information you get from torturing somebody is crap, and interrogators know it.

On the other hand, if you use torture as it was originally intended, it works wonderfully. It inspires terror and obedience in a population, makes them pliable and cooperative to know that if they are picked up for whatever crime they will be tortured until they confess to anything the interrogators.

In short, as an interrogation device, torture is a failure. But at inspiring a population to helplessness and stark terror, it's just ducky.

But that would mean that we are inspiring terror. Wouldn't that make us...........?