My thoughts: Good questioning isn’t done in a vacuum. We don’t take every 9th person off the street (or desert) and start drilling them. Critical: There’s a reason they’re in the hot seat–investigators don’t want to waste their efforts on the wrong people, so for self-serving reasons they want “good” prospects to start with, ones that are known to be involved or knowledgeable.

Reliable information doesn’t exist in a vacuum, either. Crude checks and balances: 1-Interrogators already know some things. 2-They can corroborate or discount others.

All that said, you’re right, points well taken… it could work out wrongly. That’s a chance, and it’s probably happened. But do you quit altogether because it doesn’t work perfectly every time?

I’ve had a few cars fail to start on me–and twice as many motorcycles–but I haven’t decided to never use one again.

-jef

Here are the only instances where torture would fail to bring accurate results: 1-the technique itself is inadequate, or 2-it’s stopped too soon.”

I think you’ve got a false premise here, too. This assumes that the person being tortured actually knows something. According to this reasoning, he’ll make something up if he doesn’t. Even if he does know something, how do you tell where his knowledge ends, and the made up stuff begins?

Better mental torture, than physical, because mental torture will reveal the truth. Physical, won’t. If a person is not mentally tortured and does not give any kind of revelations through body language then maybe that person is innocent and time for the authorities to look at other suspects.