Torture yields false intelligence and creates more terrorists than it kills
Evidence
From a purely intelligence point of view, experience teaches that more often than not the collating services are overwhelmed by a mountain of false information extorted from victims desperate to save themselves further agony. Also, it is bound to drive into the enemy camp the innocents who have wrongly been submitted to torture. As Camus declares: “torture has perhaps saved some at the expense of honour, by uncovering thirty bombs, but at the same time it has created fifty new terrorists who, operating in some other way and in another place, would cause the death of even more innocent people”. — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 611
Categorization
- XREF: Camus’s net-negative-torture arithmetic directly echoes the saving/destroying calculus of colonial counterinsurgency in earlier chapters. — connects to: Torture creates more terrorists than the bombs it uncovers; Torture is counterproductive even for intelligence gathering — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 52; Torture persisted because it revealed truth and displayed power — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 110
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 611
Related
- Torture creates more terrorists than the bombs it uncovers (similarity 0.87)
- Torture is counterproductive even for intelligence gathering (similarity 0.84)
- Torture succeeding in the short term proves a double-edged long-term weapon (similarity 0.82)
- Torture proved a boomerang weapon that undermined the power using it (similarity 0.80)
- Torture’s ambiguous truth makes it a potent propaganda weapon for both sides (similarity 0.79)
- Torture more than any single factor caused France’s Algerian defeat (similarity 0.78)
Broader Connections
- Torture creates more terrorists than the bombs it uncovers
#corroborates(0.90) - Torture is counterproductive even for intelligence gathering
#corroborates(0.85) — Horne, Alistair, A Savage War of Peace- Algeria 1954-1962, 52