So everyone sent to the Gulag really was a "wrecker," "saboteur," or "counterrevolutionary"? Is it possible they made such confessions just to stop the pain?
A technique that can make anyone say anything isn't a whole lot of good.
Many folks who wouldn't crack could be made to change their minds by the sight of their children being tortured. I ask every brave defender of torture on this thread: Would you extend it to children? If not, why?
You are completely missing the point of why torture was used during the Soviet purges. It was not to find the truth, but simply get confessions and more names on paper. The torturers knew they were not getting true confessions. They just had a quota to fill.
In contrast, when the Soviet secret police were breaking up the Trust counterrevolutionary group in the 1920s, torture was used to get information and they were interested in its accuracy.
A technique that can make anyone say anything isn't a whole lot of good.
Short answer - torture those who are known to be guilty and cross check the information and come back if the victim misleads.
It works quite well when combined with normal investigative techniques. Do an normal investigation to figure who is who and what they know. Then use torture to extract the contents of what the victim knows.
For example, when the Gestapo was rolling up the Red Orchestra spy ring, the Gestapo used normal investigative police techniques to identify the next operative in the chain, brought them in and tortured out the information needed to get the next spy in the chain. I forget whether they got to the radio operator first (via radio triangulation) and then worked back to the spies in the government or vice versa.
The History Channel program also had a video interview of the sole survivor, who had actually resisted breaking under torture. He attributed that to plain luck. According to him, anyone being tortured will talk at some point and what is said is beyond rational control. Note that only one member of the ring resisted.
Torture works to extract information from a victim whose involvement has been determined from other sources.
Many folks who wouldn't crack could be made to change their minds by the sight of their children being tortured. I ask every brave defender of torture on this thread: Would you extend it to children? If not, why?
Unless you are talking about a parent-child terrorist partnership, the child is a non-combatant and an innocent, the terrorist is a combatant and actively wicked. Now why are the people making this argument unable to tell the difference between the two?
Instead of making this emotionally manipulative argument, their time would be better spent on better arguments.
They could argue that modern coercive techniques work just as quickly and with better accuracy. Of course, most people opposing torture want things like waterboarding outlawed as well.
They could try to point out how torturing a captive terrorist who has time bomb ticking somewhere (and thus has not really surrendered) is different and wrong in contrast to shooting the terrorist when he is planting the bomb.