Why Torture Doesn’t Work
The Neuroscience of Interrogation
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- 26,99 €
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- 26,99 €
Publisher Description
Torture is banned because it is cruel and inhumane. But as Shane O’Mara writes in this account of the human brain under stress, another reason torture should never be condoned is because it does not work the way torturers assume it does.
In countless films and TV shows such as Homeland and 24, torture is portrayed as a harsh necessity. If cruelty can extract secrets that will save lives, so be it. CIA officers and others conducted torture using precisely this justification. But does torture accomplish what its defenders say it does? For ethical reasons, there are no scientific studies of torture. But neuroscientists know a lot about how the brain reacts to fear, extreme temperatures, starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, and immersion in freezing water, all tools of the torturer’s trade. These stressors create problems for memory, mood, and thinking, and sufferers predictably produce information that is deeply unreliable—and, for intelligence purposes, even counterproductive. As O’Mara guides us through the neuroscience of suffering, he reveals the brain to be much more complex than the brute calculations of torturers have allowed, and he points the way to a humane approach to interrogation, founded in the science of brain and behavior.
Torture may be effective in forcing confessions, as in Stalin’s Russia. But if we want information that we can depend on to save lives, O’Mara writes, our model should be Napoleon: “It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
O'Mara, professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College, Dublin, has written a dense but persuasive scientific analysis of the evidence against the efficacy of torture. Movies and TV shows often portray torture as an essential means for extracting vital information that villains are withholding, but that's not the case in real life, O'Mara writes. That withheld information, presumably locked in the prisoner's memories, is wildly unreliable; studies universally show that memory is not a photographic record, but "more like a Wikipedia page you can go change it, but so can other people." Despite their quasi-scientific rhetoric, all arguments favoring torture are based on an emotional appeal; the actual research is damning. In often gruesome and turgid scholarly prose, O'Mara describes the effects on brain function of stress, pain, sleep deprivation, starvation, drowning, heat, and cold. The results are dismal; these experiences do not facilitate recall, and memories degrade. Even the traditional claim that torture saves lives by quickly revealing critical information turns out to be wrong: torture takes a surprisingly long time to produce what is only questionable information. Persistent, nonviolent interrogation, meanwhile, has a good track record. O'Mara has written a sober, convincing argument that torture is practically worthless and morally disgraceful.