Baily,
As you said, there is a time and a place for everything. Torture is indeed wrong, but so are many things that are necessary at times. Sometimes, you have to do something that isn't good in an effort to prevent something even worse from happening.
It's not all about our nation. There are places out there where innocent people will be hurt if information isn't recovered from others. These things do happen outside our little Cuban resort. These other people won't give up that information unless you pull it out of them.
"Waterboarding" isn't your first line of offense. I'm not a football man, but I understand that this might be a little like a "Hail Mary". It's something that happens when there isn't enough time and you have run out of options. Please correct me if my football reference is inaccurate.
I'm a tough son of a bitch. I can withstand all manner of punishment and keep going. If I had critical information and someone wanted it; and they tried to beat it out of me, I just might make it to my death without giving it up. I might not, but it is a possibility, as I'm a pretty tough guy and resistant to that sort of punishment. I still might not make it, though. I'd damn sure enough try to mislead them to get out of it, though. That's just not the way to get information out of a tough bastard. It will work on many people, but some of them aren't going to break.
What's the longest time you have been awake? I've tried many times, and my absolute limit is 5 days. Beyond that, there is no telling how much resistance I'd be able to provide. At 5 days, my brain is there, but my mind is not. I'm used to being without sleep. I've gone many days at a time without sleep throughout my life. Even now, I've been awake for a very long time; and I can only go 5 days before I start to snap.
Stick me in a soundproof, completely dark box, so small that I can't even budge in for that time, and it's going to be far worse, so long as you keep me awake. Once I'm absolutely shaking from the cold, the mental strain, and the deprivation of my senses, random lengths of quiet destroyed by random lengths of deafening sound will cap off the job completely.
After that time awake, your body will start to react almost violently in order to provoke sleep if you are actively being denied it. Your resistance is fried completely, but that's not enough in a select few cases. People can be conditioned or "programmed", as it is said, to give false information when under sedation, and they might revert to that conditioning with the lack of sleep.
So, it doesn't end there. Even a spelunker will become claustrophobic if they are stuffed in a vertical box so small that it's even hard to breathe, and small enough to prevent all but the slightest budge.
Now, purely hypothetically, of course, what if you were to fill that box up with sand to his neck, and leave him there for a week? He has been deprived of any stimulus for a very long time, and denied of sleep beyond the human limit. No sound, very little heat, and no light at all. Throughout the entire process, the only human interaction he has experienced is a shock whenever he nods off, and even that was delivered remotely.
So, after all that lack of stimulation, he is fried. Still, you want accurate information, and you've already invested a lot of time with this one. If you have to go through it all again, odds are, he will lose his mind. It has to happen now.
And that's when the deafening noise is released into that box, at random, with intolerably bright lights; sometimes flashing, as well at random, and the proper torture continues. Sometimes it catches him when he is losing it. Sometimes, it catches him when he is just entering REM sleep. It always catches him, though, and he cannot predict when it will happen. Occasionally, water is poured into the sand from above, over his head. It fills up just fast enough for him to inhale some, but drains into the sand before he drowns.
At this time, his brain and memories are there, but his mind is broken. He may recover, or he may not. Everyone is different. Occasional, very mentally cruel methods of asking questions are presented. He is encouraged by meaningless quiet whispers during the times of claustrophobic, dark, silent "peace", that occasionally manifest themselves into suggestions. The little devil on his shoulder; the voices that are being built into his mind... they want him to speak. He will speak. When he does, the over-stimulation begins again.
This continues for some time. Eventually, he will have given up everything he knows.
Everything, because that's what those whispers in the night carefully suggested him to do. He may have even rambled on about his past, but the suggestions caused him to release the required information. In a broken mind, the information is still intact, and the voices reach it. His body simply transmits it like a machine.
At no point during this process was he interacted with on a human level. The closest he ever came to human contact were the faceless masks that delivered him into that hell.
There are other things to do within the process or at this point.
When he is as recovered as he can be, if he ever can (and with a proper job for incredibly critical information, he won't), he will hate himself for it, as a drunk hates himself in the morning if he had told his mother that he never loved her, in that night of indulgence. Only, this time, there is no reconciliation. He knows people will die because he was broken. He has betrayed everything that he loved. Leave him in a cell with a knife, and he might even do the final job for you. Walk by his cell with a bloody wax replica of his daughter's or mother's, or even the real head of a dead man in the right uniform, and he almost certainly will.
Mission accomplished. You have recovered the information, and the carrier is dead. The only time you even touched him was when you put him in that box, and even then, you were wearing a faceless mask.
I mean, you
could just try and pull his fingernails out and threaten him, if you want. How, though, with such treatment, do you think you will reach his subconscious mind?
You don't, and you can't. You must destroy his conscious mind, tear away from him all that
is him; pull the immortal soul right out of his body. Replace his humanity, and leave him only with whispered suggestion in that alien world. Those voices, sometimes within as little as a week or two, will become his entire existence.
The data, however, is still on his hard drive, even if he is not, and you have full access to the drive, as if you simply installed it into another computer. His mind is now your mind, and his body is only there to keep it alive long enough to recover the information.
You have turned him into a biological flash drive. At this point, you could even use him to
store information, if you keep him alive, and keep anything that's left of what made him
him in that constant state of torment. Eventually, if not already, it will all simply bleed away.
Of course, as Knewsom said, it doesn't work.
As I said, no offense meant. This sort of thing isn't something people are commonly exposed to, either on paper or in reality. There are more ways to get at people, depending on the person. There are even better ways. This is a bit of a cliff's notes diatribe of one very simple way to dissect a brain.
Torture is evil, and it's essentially worse than killing someone. Sometimes, however, you just have to sacrifice that lamb.
Torture isn't about getting someone to talk.
Torture is about recovering information.
To recover information, you have to look at a human as a computer with a firewall, the computer being the brain, and the firewall being the mind. You have to be capable of more than butchery or killing. You have to be capable of seeing them as a simple storage device, and you must be capable of going beyond killing, as you must see and
understand that it is possible to destroy the very thing that makes us human. You must be able to accept that fact, witness it, and even cause it.
As such, a torturer tortures himself a little more with every recovery.
This post is an illustration of why it is that proper torture isn't practiced very often, and why it took centuries to develop.
First, it's hard to find trustworthy, mentally sound people who will do such things in silence, and who are content to stand by and observe someone falling apart, without feeling compelled to help or offer interaction.
Second, it is a horrible thing to do to anyone, and if our government was ever caught doing such things, the public simply wouldn't understand.
Third, it's just not done very often, or at all, by organizations like our government. It certainly isn't done by the military. Our government does what it can when it has to. They have people who occasionally get people to talk, and everyone knows who they are. I'm not aware of any organization within the US that practices proper information recovery. There might be one, but if there was, it would be incredibly tight-lipped about the practice, for obvious reasons. I hope we have one somewhere. I hope the "waterboarding" controversy is a bit of a smoke screen; a sacrificing of a practice to save another and to keep that other practice a secret.
Our government isn't nearly as nefarious as people might think, however. The decisions are made by a bunch of fat, balding men; not seedy shadow-lurking monsters. The idea that they could ever accomplish a proper conspiracy without people catching on is almost laughable.
Some of their best tricks, the ones that actually worked, were quite stupid. Nobody shot that extra plane down, even though anyone with half a mind would do it. Kennedy was shot by... err... THIS GUY! Area 51 is not only not there, even if you can see it, but we will convince a bunch of nerds and rednecks that it's there to house aliens. That will cover up that testing ground and our other testing grounds.
Dealing with government projects and security is like driving a rare Shelby Mustang. It's just not nearly as cool as you thought it would be. You may as well just buy a normal one, build a replica, and up the performance.
Oh, dear. I think this one was a rather long post, even by my own standards.
Cheers,
Kennith
