When I was younger I used to like show called "The Prisoner", in which a British spy was captured and held by an unknown power in an unknown site that seemed to resemble coastal resort town.
Usually they didn't hurt him much but the played with his head a lot.
He out smarted them a lot but never enough to get away , there was a sort of living balloon that would enfold him an carry him back if he got too far.
They never made the point of it all clear , but every time that the guy {they called him number six} didn't tell them what they wanted to know, it was another victory on which to end the show.
Is it possible to out smart a prisoner in a dependable way? If every capture is a dead end and we lean nothing as we go along we will not et as far as we might if we manage to learn something from our captives.
Perhaps a lot could be done by tricking the prisoners , but we will have to develop a cadre of experts , do we want a cadre of experts?
That sounds like a really interesting show, Plane.
I don't know that I can answer the questions you ask, but I can tell you how some militant groups minimize any damage done by interrogation techniques, even torture.
The IRA, which has really served as a model for many guerilla fighters that have come after, including the Irgun, the PLO, the EPLF, ANC, etc, organized itself in small cells where ideally an IRA member only ever dealt with two other IRA members. By doing so, everyone from the front line militant to the top planners had the most limited knowledge of operations. It wasn't "need to know" it was "could possibly know."
The IRA accepted that people would crack under torture from the British authorities. The problem was that there was only so much the individual members could tell them. For sure, some members knew more about certain aspects than others. But again, the IRA was smart with this as well. Most of their funding came through the legal (well, sometimes legal) political wing of Sinn Fein or through sympathetic Irish and especially Irish-American Catholics (and some Protestants as well).
In the latter part of the Troubles the British were far better served by their MI5 infiltrators than their interrogation techniques. In fact, the justice system in Northern Ireland and Britain had simply become corrupted and biased against the Irish Catholics. The Guildford Four and the
Birmingham Six, were examples of miscarriages of justice corrected later, but not until men served well over a decade for crimes they did not commit. They happened to be Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I think it wise to be sure and learn from the mistakes of the past. I'm not sure torture, to whatever degree is going to bring about much useful information. And, if we go too far down that path, do we risk passing on the attitude to our entire justice system (whether in Iraq or in the United States as well) that force and coercion are acceptable, especially against certain people?
