Friday, November 10, 2017

Torture doesn't work

The Guardian has a long piece about a pair of scientists who have proved what everyone knew but many didn't want to admit - that torture doesn't work for extracting information.  The article also covers how you should go about an interrogation.
The Alisons, husband and wife, have done something no scholars of interrogation have been able to do before. Working in close cooperation with the police, who allowed them access to more than 1,000 hours of tapes, they have observed and analysed hundreds of real-world interviews with terrorists suspected of serious crimes. No researcher in the world has ever laid hands on such a haul of data before. Based on this research, they have constructed the world's first empirically grounded and comprehensive model of interrogation tactics.