Interrogated for Nothing: Difference between revisions
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{{trope}}
{{quote|"''I fear you speak upon the rack''
''Where men enforced do speak anything.''"
|'''[[William Shakespeare]]'s''' ''[[The Merchant of Venice]]''}}
Our Hero has been captured. He's being asked questions, and has folded under [[Cold-Blooded Torture]] or [[Truth Serum]]. And then they ask what the plans are for something he doesn't know. Of course, they will believe he is somehow resisting, hiding that vital knowledge. So, the cruelty intensifies.
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{{examples}}
== Anime and Manga ==
* ''[[Death Note]]'' has a variation, where L imprisons and interrogates Misa on completely accurate suspicions that she is the second Kira... unaware that, through a trick of the Note, all of her pertinent memories have been erased. This goes on for a ''month'' before the team convinces him to try something else.
* ''[[Now and Then, Here and There]]'': This happens to Shu during the first few episodes. Worse, {{spoiler|Abelia is quite aware from the begining that he doesn't know anything but is forced to keep torturing him, on King Hamdo's orders.}}
* Near the end of ''[[Last Exile]]'', [[spoiler:Alex Rowe is given a [[Truth Serum]] by Delphine in order to obtain the information that she needs. It turns out that Alex never entrusted himself with the last piece of the poem, [[Xanatos Gambit|predicting the possiblity of being captured and interrogated.]]
* In ''[[Ah! My Goddess]]'', Urd, while in Lord of Terror mode, briefly tries to torture Keichii for information about the Ultimate Destruction Program. She quickly learns that all he knows about it is the fact that it exists.
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* A version of this is the focus of ''[[Slumdog Millionaire]]'', where Jamal is tortured to find out how he cheated. At his repeated insistence, the two cops eventually acknowledge that he might be telling the truth about not cheating a few hours in. After they ''stop'' torturing him and interrogate him somewhat more civilly, Jamal tells them, in the form of flashbacks to his life story, exactly how he was able to get each answer right.
* In ''To End All Wars'', Yanker is viciously beaten with a shovel after one goes missing and he admits to taking it to keep everyone else from getting killed. It isn't till after he's paralyzed that the commander discovers that there was just a miscount and none of the shovels are missing after all.
* This is the whole point of the film ''[[wikipedia:Rendition
* ''[[Ichi the Killer]]'': A horrific torture scene occurs when the sadomasochistic Yakuza Kakihara is led to believe that a Yakuza from another gang is responsible for the disappearance of his boss. The man is completely innocent, but the gruesome damage is done by the time they realize it.
* Mentioned in ''[[Dr. Strangelove]].'' When [[General Ripper]] is realizing he's about to be arrested for treason and tortured for the recall codes, he suddenly asks Mandrake if he's ever been tortured as a war prisoner. Mandrake explains that he was captured and tortured by the Japanese during World War II. When asked if he talked, he explains they didn't seem to want any information. {{spoiler|Ripper kills himself shortly afterward.}} It's all funnier than it sounds.
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* ''The Terrorizers'': Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm novel. Secret agent/assassin Matt Helm is captured by the enemy, who torture him to find out vital information. Unfortunately he has amnesia, so he can't tell them anything. They think he's faking and continue the torment.
* [[Robert Heinlein]]'s ''[[Friday (novel)|Friday]]''. The title character voluntarily spills her guts to her interrogators, which is standard policy for her organization as a highly trained courier is far more important than any piece of information they may be carrying at one time. As her boss knows anyone will eventually crack, he deliberately withholds information about anything important. After questioning her under [[Truth Serum]] and getting the same story, they decide she's been hypnotically conditioned to tell false information and ruthlessly torture her. The interrogators end up respecting their victim as the only person they couldn't crack under torture.
* The climax of ''
* In ''[[Roswell High]]'', towards the end of the first season Max is being held by evil government people who torture him into telling them various things. But then they want him to show them how to use some device that he has no clue how to work (or he'd have already used it), and start to cut him open when he doesn't.
* In the third and fourth ''Tennis Shoe Adventure'' books, Garth is captured by the current [[Big Bad]] (King Jacob) who wants the location of a fabled treasure. Garth was looking for the treasure, but never found it. King Jacob doesn't believe this, so he goes after Garth's family, finally kidnapping one of his nieces. Her torture, {{spoiler|apparent death and subsequent recovery}} and a [[Heroic BSOD]] follow. Eventually, King Jacob realizes that Garth ''doesn't'' know, and leaves.
* An ironic variant in ''[[Flashman|Flashman and the Mountain of Light]]'':
* In a ''[[Star Wars]]'' short story, Corran Horn helps a group of rebel sympathizers escape an Imperial Prefect, while simultaneously framing the man for rebel sympathies and murder. Horn's thick-skulled Imperial liaison (when he was still working for CorSec) takes the overseer away for an interrogation session, with the innocent man mentally remarking how bitterly hilarious it is that he will be tortured endlessly for information that he doesn't have.
* ''[[Vorkosigan Saga|Ethan of Athos:]]'' Ethan is captured and questioned by the Cetagandans about the location of Terrance Cee, first using a truth serum, and then upping the ante to more and more painful methods. Since this is the first Ethan's ever heard of Terrance, he tells them he doesn't know who they're talking about, right from the beginning.
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* ''[[Star Trek: The Next Generation]]'': Picard refuses to give up the Minos Korva defense plans under truth serum. How? Because he has no idea what they are. His captor, Gul Madred, works it out eventually...and keeps going, switching his focus to simply breaking Picard for its own sake, via "[[Two Plus Torture Makes Five|How many lights do you see]]?"
* ''[[24]]'' had at least two victims, a CTU analyst and the Secretary of Defence's son, who the good guys torture to no avail.
* ''[[Lost]]'': Sayid tortures Sawyer because he and Jack think he stole Shannon's inhalers. Only after shoving sticks of bamboo up under his finger nails for a few agonizing minutes does Sayid learn that {{spoiler|Sawyer never had the inhalers in the first place, and was being so stubborn just so he could get a kiss from Kate.}}
* On ''[[Rookie Blue]]'' Sam is tortured by a criminal who wants to know who killed the criminal's family and why the cops covered it up. Sam knew the guy's family was dead but had no knowledge of the rest. The criminal realizes that Sam probably knows nothing but decides to continue just to make sure.
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== Tabletop Games ==
* The ''[[Dungeons
== Video Games ==
* In ''[[Mass Effect 2]]'', Shepard and his/her squad come across a prisoner being brutally beaten by a guard while on a mission to pick up a convict from a prison ship. (Shepard has the option of convincing or intimidating the guard to stand down.) It isn't made clear whether the guards are looking for information or not, but speaking with another prisoner strongly implies the guards are just torturing him as punishment for 'offing' another prisoner, knowing full well he doesn't have anything to tell them. It's the ''[[Cowboy Cop]]'' who points out that it's just meaningless cruelty.
{{quote|
* Midway through ''[[Final Fantasy VIII]]'', Seifer subjects Squall to [[Electric Torture]], demanding to know the "true purpose" of SeeD, the mercenary organization which trained both of them. Squall not only doesn't know, he has no earthly idea what Seifer is even talking about, making his only options "make something up" or "try to get the interrogator to kill him."
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== Web Comics ==
* ''[[The Order of the Stick]]'' does this, although actual torture isn't shown (thumbscrews, water torture and the rack are all mentioned). Instead, he's told that innocent people will be thrown off a tower into a horrific snarl in space-time if he doesn't give up the information he doesn't know (and a control group will be thrown off the other side, just off the tower, not into the Snarl. [[For Science!]]!). Notably, the fact that he maintains his claim of ignorance in face of this threat confirms his torturer's suspicions that he's telling the truth, while the actual torture didn't.
== Western Animation ==
* Arcee's backstory in ''[[Transformers Prime]]'' involved her being captured by Airachnid, who brutally tortured her in order to gain attack coordinates. When that failed, Airachnid threatened to kill Arcee's partner Tailgate unless Arcee gave her the coordinates. Unfortunately for Arcee, she genuinely didn't know the coordinates, leading to the loss of her partner when Airachnid refused to believe her.
* In ''[[My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic|My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic]]'' episode "Party Of One", Spike honestly has no idea what Pinkie wants to know during his interrogation, so simply tells her what she wants to hear. Ironically, he might have known or guessed about the surprise party Pinkie's friends are holding, so if she'd merely asked him what her friends were doing that afternoon, he might have been able to tell her, and avoid all of the [[Enhanced Interrogation Techniques|unpleasantness]].
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* There's one story about a man tortured by the Khmer Rouge who told interrogators that he was [[The Pope]], a [[Hermaphrodite]], and an American spy. As some have said, presumably the interrogators were feeling bored that day.
* Up until the Nineteenth Century, people in Europe were often accused of witchcraft. The vast majority of the accused, believe it or not, were not witches. This did not stop the interrogators from torturing them in an attempt to gain a confession of witchcraft. In the event that the accused made no confessions, they were deemed to be obstinate and the level of torture was escalated until they either did confess or expired
It's a pretty fair bet that in this case, they weren't just looking for an admission that yes, you were practicing dark magic; they were after a recantation, too. [[Shoot the Shaggy Dog|After which they'd probably kill you anyway, although in a much less harsh fashion than burning,]] in order to [[From a Certain Point of View|safeguard your soul]] from future temptations.
** Not to mention that, if you were convicted, all your worldly possessions and wealth would become the property of the witch hunters, so there wasn't a lot of incentive to find you not guilty...
*** This was ironically enough one of the reasons why many Catholic clergymen turned ''against'' the [[Witch Hunt
** This is still done today in [[Witch Hunt
*** There is again a profit motive, the victims are often poor people (e.g. old single women) killed when the family is too poor to afford their keep. It's a way to provide moral justification for putting your elders out in the snow, in the absence of snow. Shamans who claim to be able to cure witches do so by taking them in and paying for their keep until things get better and the person is 'cured' (rituals are involved, as well as paying for their keep).
{{reflist}}
[[Category:A Tortured Index]]
[[Category:
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