In order to achieve this goal, police may use a combination of negative or positive tactics. Getting a confession from someone is not a simple task, even though detectives sometimes get confessions from innocent people. No two interrogations are the same, but most exploit weaknesses in human nature. These weaknesses typically rely on stress when people experience contrasting extremes, like control and dependence, dominance and submission, and the maximization and minimization of consequence. Even the most hardened criminal will end up confessing as long as the interrogator can find the right combination of techniques that are based on the suspect’s personality and experiences. In the United States, scholars came to an estimate of that is somewhere between 42% and 55% of suspects confess to a crime when they are being interrogated. Police interrogations weren’t always this complex, not until the early 1900s anyway. In the United States, physical abuse was an acceptable (if not legal) method to getting a confession. Confessions obtained by the interrogation techniques—deprivation of food or water, bright lights shining in the eyes, physical discomfort and long time in isolation, beating with a rubber hose or other instruments that doesn’t leave any visible mark. This was usually admissible in court as long as the suspect signed and agreed to a waiver, stating that …show more content…
Information can matter even more when the adversary wears no uniform and blends in with the civilian population, in a “war against terrorism”. Can torture sometimes be justified to extract information? The international law says “No.” as laid down in treaties like the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; all ban torture or any cruel, inhuman or degrading treatments, even in times of war. Most civilized people squirm of the thought of putting suspected terrorists on a rack or taking their toenails off. What if the suspect knew of the whereabouts of a ticking bomb or maybe a biological, chemical or even a nuclear bomb? Couldn’t a little bit of sleep deprivation, or sexual humiliation, maybe even water-drinking be justified to save hundreds or thousands of lives? In a BBC survey of 27,000 people in 25 countries last October, including America, over one of three people in nine of those countries considered the tactics of torture acceptable if it saves lives. The people who opposed were mostly from Europe and English-speaking countries. In another poll in 2005 by the Pew Research Centre found that nearly half of all Americans thought torturing suspected terrorists were sometimes