The Efficacy Of Torture Interrogation

For thousands of years, countries have employed torture as a wartime interrogation technique to extract information from prisoners at an accelerated rate. However, there are records dating back to times as early as the third century, noting the inaccuracy of this practice. As Ulpian of Rome claimed, intelligence collected through torture was rarely legitimate because some warriors were “so susceptible to pain that they would lie rather than suffer it” (Peters ?). Ulpian’s reluctance to trust torture as an interrogation device echoed through the years, and we see the same hesitance in modern day civilizations. Today, CIA field agents affirm that during training, soldiers would endure torture resistance training, teaching them to make believable …show more content…
The Army Field Manual acknowledges this practice and explains that strategically useful information is most likely to come from humanely treated war prisoners (Leahy ?). Although many international laws and codes prohibit this behavior, governments continue to characterize torture as an indispensable interrogation tool for gathering strategic intelligence, arguing that the extraction of information is necessary. Despite these few hypothesized benefits that torture may produce, the costs of torture significantly outweigh the benefits.Though the immoral nature is a large consideration when discussing the efficacy of torture, this essay will argue that even disregarding the immorality, torture is ineffective by nature and does not produce the results necessary to justify employing the practice even from a utilitarian …show more content…
However, there exist many comparable cases from criminal prosecutions proving the inefficacy of techniques that are comparable to torture. A large scale examination of wrongly convicted criminals revealed that false confessions account for almost a quarter of wrongful convictions (Drizin and Leo ?). After studying hundreds of false confessions as proven by dna analysis, Drizin and Leo were able to identify two common characteristics of false confessions. Firstly, they often occurred when a suspect was accused of the most serious crimes, including murder and rape. The second thing that they discovered was that “as the coerciveness of the interrogation increases, the probability of eliciting a false confession also increases” (Kassin & Gudjonsson ?). The fundamental aspect of this discovery is applicable to torture because the coercion in torture based interrogations is far greater than that employed during criminal interrogations, so torture is likely to elicit a higher proportion of false