Torture Does Work

Torture is a poor way to obtain information, but nothing works better when you want to extract a false confession. The New York Times reports:

Iranian leaders say they have obtained confessions from top reformist officials that they plotted to bring down the government with a “velvet” revolution. Such confessions, almost always extracted under duress, are part of an effort to recast the civil unrest set off by Iran’s disputed presidential election as a conspiracy orchestrated by foreign nations, human rights groups say.

Reports on Iranian Web sites associated with prominent conservatives said that leading reformers have confessed to taking velvet revolution “training courses” outside the country. Alef, a Web site of a conservative member of Parliament, referred to a video of Mohammad Ali Abtahi, who served as vice president in the reform government of former President Mohammed Khatami, as showing that he tearfully “welcomed being defrocked and has confessed to provoking people, causing tension and creating media chaos.”

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative to the Revolutionary Guards, Mojtaba Zolnour, said in a speech Thursday that almost everyone now detained had confessed — raising the prospect that more confessions will be made public. Ayatollah Khamenei is supreme religious leader.

The government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners held without charge or legal representation, often subjected to pressure tactics like sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, according to human rights groups and former political prisoners. Human rights groups estimate that hundreds of people have been detained.

They fear the confessions are part of a concerted effort to lay the groundwork for banning existing reformist political parties and preventing any organized reform movement in the future. “They hope with this scenario they can expunge them completely from the political process,” said Hadi Ghaemi, coordinator of International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran, a New York-based group. “They don’t want them to come back as part of a political party.”

3 Comments

  1. 1
    Mike b.t.r.m. says:

    I wonder how many Iranian protestors that got stitched up from wounds inflicted by police realized how fortunate they were that they didn’t get water poured in their face instead. Just shows how much restraint the Iranian police have over those evil entities that ran Gitmo. A blow to the head with a club certainly less tramatic than waterboarding. No wonder Obama is so willing to try to work with the Iranian leadership.

  2. 2
    Ron Chusid says:

    The point is that, regardless of the forms of torture used, torture is generally used to obtain false confessions. This has been true all through history. This is also true in Iran, and was the case when the Bush administration used torture to try to obtain statements tying Iraq to al Qaeda.

    If the goal is to obtain false confessions, as it generally is with torture, then torture does work. It is a poor technique for obtaining  accurate information.

  3. 3
    Mike b.t.r.m. says:

    Yes, sorry for not acknowledging your larger point about torture. I totally agree that torture has been proven pretty pointless unless your goal is to obtain a false confession for whatever purpose. May I add, and I can’t remember the source but essentially the point of torture comes from a desire to inflict pain, without any purpose but to inflict the pain.

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