I have done a little research today on the history of torture.
In modern times torture has been used for three purposes:
1) To extract public confessions or political statements favorable to the torturers which would then be used for propaganda purposes. This was done by the Russians in the 1930's and North Vietnamese in the Vietnam war.
2) To control a population or group of people. Basically make examples of some "disobedient" individuals so as to influence others of that group to "behave." The Nazi's did this in Eastern Europe and France against partisans and various south and central american countries did this kind of thing in the post WW II time frame (the "dirty war" in Argentina is a prime example). The British did some of this in Ireland.
3) To attempt to extract tactical military intelligence. Both Germany and Japan did this during WW II.
There is no evidence that 3 works. From Wikipedia: "There is a strong utilitarian argument against torture; namely, that there is simply no scientific evidence supporting its effectiveness.
The lack of scientific basis for the effectiveness of torture as an interrogation techniques is summarized in a 2006 Intelligence Science Board report titled "EDUCING INFORMATION, Interrogation: Science and Art, Foundations for the Future". The report is currently hosted in the FAS website. http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf"
It's also highly debatable whether torture "works" for the second purpose (controlling a population) in other than the short run. It seems to me that in most cases the torturing entity suffered a backlash and torture turned out to be counter-productive.
For the first purpose descibed above (extracting a statment to be used for propoganda purposes) I guess you could say torture "works" because numerous statements *have* been extracted in this manner. But is this the kind of business anyone really wants to be in?
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