Why torture doesnt work

Witches are not. But real or imagined, torture doesn't work. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up.

Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber? Create Account See Subscription Options. Another fascinating study that O'Mara details indicates that activating "a principally brainstem-based reflexive network that is directed toward immediate survival and that has a principal function of suppressing activity in brain areas that are unrelated to immediate survival…leave a prisoner being tortured incapable of saying much that is useful.

Perhaps the most interesting chapter in O'Mara's book focuses on how the brain reacts to sleep deprivation. Calling sleep deprivation a "cognitive pathology," O'Mara points to research studies indicating that severe sleep deprivation causes "deficits" across cognitive, physiological, and immune functions such that it significantly impinges on one's ability to think about the past, events and places one has been to, and plans for the future.

For the uninitiated in the terminology and nomenclature around torture, the book is illuminating in its descriptions of waterboarding, white torture, and dietary manipulations.

And O'Mara populates research studies throughout the book to support his thesis that none of these forms of torture work, if "work" means to elicit information that will help governments gain useful intelligence to save lives. His criticisms of the CIA—and just about all government officials who utilize these torture techniques—is resolute. For example, Goodman-Delahunty and colleagues 3 interviewed 64 law enforcement practitioners and detainees from five different countries, who were involved in high-stakes cases, mainly in alleged acts of terrorism.

They found that reported confessions and admissions of guilt were four times more likely when the interrogators adopted a respectful interview strategy that aimed at building rapport with the detainee. The techniques had been devised by two psychologists with no expertise in interrogation, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, and have been widely discredited, including by a detailed report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence produced in and declassified in 6.

Abu Zubaydah was the first detainee to be subjected to the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques. Over 17 days in August , he was subjected to walling, attention grasps, slapping, facial hold, stress positions, cramped confinement in a coffin, white noise and sleep deprivation for almost 24 hours a day.

He was waterboarded 2—4 times a day, which led to spasms, vomiting and, occasionally, loss of consciousness. The CIA's use of enhanced interrogation techniques during the Bush administration caused international controversy when it became public. The revelation was soon followed by another disturbing set of facts: senior officials at the American Psychological Association colluded with the US Department of Defense for the greater part of a decade following the terrorist attacks to provide ethical cover for its interrogation programme and to remove the ethical barriers for psychologists taking part in such interrogation 7.

From Saddam Hussein's prisons to Guantanamo, the new millennium has seen autocracies and democracies engage in torture. While the arguments against torture are primarily ethical and legal, they are pragmatic, too. Torture, as a method for information extraction, just does not work.

Bonaparte, N. Plon, H. Google Scholar. O'Mara, S. Press, Moheb Costandi, M. His work has been published in Nature , New Scientist , Science , and Scientific American , among others, and he is also author of the long-standing Neurophilosophy blog, hosted by The Guardian. Costandi has written extensively about neuroethics for the Dana Foundation, and serves on the board of directors of the International Neuroethics Society.

National Center for Biotechnology Information , U. Journal List Cerebrum v. Moheb Costandi , M.