At best the claim is a statement of faith. There are effectively NO peer-reviewed studies of the effectiveness of brain scanning technologies, because the technology is proprietary and the owners won’t allow its methods to be studied. They have conducted some studies of their own, but they violate every canon of blindness and impartiality. Article from a recent American Journal of Bioethics here (subscription required).

http://www.bioethics.net/journal/index.php?jid=18

Dude, when will people give up on the easy road to phenomenological conquering of the human mind?

There are ways to cheat the polygraph, and ways will be figured out to cheat your perfectly complete brain scan. Initially the polygraph worked, until people figured out how to “break” it. And being an engineer with some amount of science background, I take any assurances of “perfect” and “side-effect free” science with a large grain of salt. If I were to use harsher language, I would use words with the letters B and S in them.

And that the threat of torture is not coercion, what can I possibly say that is not already implied … and of course, only lying terrorists will be tortured. People where the brain scan does not indicate lying but which fail to produce the desired information will be released immediately—but wait, maybe we just failed to ask the right questions … or to “set the proper conditions” …

Of course it is. My point, which has been made more intelligibly by others, is that the past is just as foreign a country as (say) China: Mrs. T’s historical ruminations hinted at a historical elision.

But since you’re playing, I will say that no monotonically-functioned metanarrative of nation ethics strikes me as possible or even sensible.

Especially in a torture situation, the interrogators will just get the offered information confirmed/thrown back at them. Which may be exactly the point—the information comes from the person interrogated, and is demonstrably not “invented” by them.

With many systematic persecutions or other systematically executed efforts to address a “problem”, the sequence of event often goes like this:

A problem is perceived, and its supposed cause (enemy action) and a class of “enemy” identified.
A “solution” to the problem is devised (arrest and/or extermination of the enemy), plus procedures for executing this.
Based on a priori judgement, and updated as we go, estimates of enemy strength, and quotas for arrest/extermination are made and distributed (cf. also “body count”).
It is understood that rounding up random people will not solve the problem (our actors may be misguided, but they are not that stupid). Rather it is understood that information about the enemy must come from enemy members itself, plus additional reconnaissance effort.
Suspected enemies and other “intelligence assets” are rounded up and “interrogated” to yield further leads. Due to the ineffectiveness of obtaining the “initial material” and the unreliable information coming out of torture (further distorted by pressure to perform on the part of “investigators”), the next rounds of arrests are of similar low quality. In addition to this, investigators have to show results (measured by number of arrests and “confessions”), leading to the obvious efforts to fill the quota.
Due to the ineffectiveness of “solving the problem”, the problem persists, or even becomes moer dire, e.g. assisted by a backlash due to information about torture, and occupier incompetence, spreading.
Rinse and repeat.

Those features can be found in the Catholic Inquisition, persecution of various enemies under Stalin, the Nazis, Middle/Southern American, Middle Eastern & other totalitarian regimes, the Vietnam/Iraq wars, etc.

I’d even make an analogy to other top-down directed approaches to solving problems perceived at the top, without allowing bottom-up feedback or considering information that is not considered expedient. The corporate world is rife of this as well (although I have not heard stories of employees being tortured for not delivering sales quotas). No joke intended. OTOH we read stories of Iraqi athletes being tortured or intimidated by Saddam Hussein’s son(s) for not performing satisfactorily in competitions, which I consider very credible.

No, what got me was the logic of it – and that a whole lot of people I knew agreed with that logic, even if if you asked them out straight “do you approve of torture” they might have gone “Ugh, you sicko!” but when it came to approving the beating of truth out of the “suspect” who you knew was guilty, ticking bomb or no, they approved when seeing it in film (so long as it was of course the Good Guys doing it, not being done to) and turned the blind eye to reports of police brutality in the news.

And I realized how easily a Good Ideal could get perverted into atrocity, how we could turn the intent to kill no innocent into a horror show, and had. Coast to coast, age to age, every race and people under the sun—
des von bladet, I have no idea what you were trying to say there – English is not your first language, then? All I am saying is, approval of official torture by law enforcement is something universal to all civilizations, which is sometimes openly acknowledged and sometimes covert, tacitly acquiesced in, and countries don’t progress steadily, we go backwards as often as forwards, or more often backwards in some areas, while improving in others.

Right now we are going back past what was okay (legally) on paper in 1600 in the Anglosphere; we are in the process of ditching, or rather, formalizing the ditching, of 1679’s human rights laws (which banned shipping people overseas to avoid charging them so you could imprison them indefinitely as well as mandating speedy trials) and zooming back to leave Magna Carta in shreds, too.

But if you died under the stones, you went to your death unconvicted of felony, nor were you deemed a suicide. You kept a clean sheet, and your stuff could go to your heir rather than to the crown.

Ancient history, of course; trial by ordeal petered out after the church stopped playing along, and trial by jury swiftly supplanted trial by combat. Trial by combat wasn’t quite as eliminated as people had thought it was, however, as the English would learn centuries later. But that’s a story for another day.

On an informal, non-codified basis, this is exactly what our own US and other Western police forces have always done. And it’s totally schiz – on the one hand, we’re shocked, shocked! at a Louima case – and OTOH “everyone knows” that the police “rough up” suspects to “make them talk.”

It’s like the 50s attitude towards marital rape and domestic violence – pretend you don’t see the bruises, accept that “she walked into a door” or “the kid tripped”…and then go all freak when some kid dies of concussion or wife is shot. Pretend it’s an isolated incident. Rinse, repeat.

In my post (22), I use the initial quote from jd’s post (12) because even amongst those whose views I might share, the error of ascribing an undefined magical power to torture, one that requires its use to be reserved for some undefined special case, is present. I’m not trying to knock jd. He just made my strong case for me to.

It’s also worth noting that the battlefield scenarios he describes (in terms of which he thinks torture may be useful) do not reflect the United States position, which seems to be to sanction and institutionalise torture, and have it be performed at leisure.

Even had his scenarios adequately described the US position, such battlefield scenarios still suffer all the defects I described, and induce all the disadvantageous consequences. Mutilated and/or tortured corpses discovered by enemy combatants do not induce fear, they induce rage, resistance and retaliation, as the US discovered in Vietnam and is redicovering in Iraq, the South African government discovered in Namibia et al, the French discovered in Algeria and so on.