About 4 years ago I went to a talk given by the author of the book, the subject was along the same lines as the book: how torture is ineffective because it damages the subject's ability to recall information. Afterwards someone asked a question that a lot of us had been thinking: that in a lot of situations where torture might be used, the information being asked for is very well known to the subject, so unless serio…
I would argue your audience is failing to understand what torture is. Most people are deathly afraid of any pain. But they're also not agents/operatives/soldiers for their government. They're not at war with an enemy they think worth fighting and killing. So they don't have a particular strong desire to conceal information from anyone who threatens them. This means, in an actual scenario of torture interrogation, you…
Both of my parents were tortured, both faced it several times. My father was in prison twice and my mother was never in prison but took directly to military places. But not only they were tortured, several people from the circle of family friends were tortured too. One of them now works in a state program trying to help the people who were tortured to continue with their lifes, even if they were tortured in 1974-1980.
While the 1973 was made with support of US and brazilian governments, there was no support when the firsts arrests came. Most of people faced strong pain under different methods, including electricity, beating to almost dead, removing nails, etc... but it was only after the US experts arrived that torture became effective.
Torture is about removing will. A common practice after that was not only rape by military, but they put dogs to rape woman. They took their fingers off and put them in cells full of shit so they had to avoid the infections. Put them in really small spaces until they were lost.
This were process made by days, they didn't get into shock status, they were destroyed as human beings. When they go out, torturers didn't ask them: "hey, how do i find this person"... they just took a bunch of pictures and check the reactions. Or they put them in a car and go around the city and let them see somebody they knew.
By the way, when you reach this point you don't care about torture anymore like to try to avoiding it letting the torturer hear anything they want to hear. You are broke, you don't have will, the only thing you can wish is to be dead. You don't resist anymore.
Torture was so effective that political organizations who were fighting the dictatorship adopted the policy of when somebody is arrested, all their known people had to run and disappear in 24 hours.