The Torturer's Dilemma: Analyzing the Logic of Torture for Information

the French public. 95 Secondly, the conscripted nature of the French army meant that those soldiers
involved in interrogations would have been less likely to reflect the institutional incentives of the
French state – acting like 'sadists' or 'professionals' as opposed to 'zealots', in the Crelinstein and
Schmid (1995) sense of these terms. The greater the professionalism of the military, the more
individual soldiers can be assumed to have been trained to reflect these institutional incentives.
Consequently, a comparison of the US and the French cases allows us to gain traction on the
final major question involved in my theory: was the failure by the French military to make positive use
of torture the result of the inherent nature of torture, or did the use of a conscripted (and therefore less
reliable) soldiery allow an agent-principle dilemma to appear? The US case is particularly useful in
this regard because there are really three cases of US torture for information. Firstly there is the use of
torture at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba by members of the regular US armed forces. These are professional
soldiers who can be assumed to more or less reflect the incentives of their superiors, and the
government above them. Secondly, the US also used torture at Abu Ghraib, a prison in Iraq. While the
interrogations were conducted by military intelligence, along with Other government Agency
representatives (a phrase referring to the CIA), the abuse itself was carried out by members of the
National Guard – non-professional soldiers whose role is most analogous to the conscripts of the
French army in Algeria. Finally, the US also made use of torture in the so-called CIA 'blacksites' –
secret prisons run throughout the world where torture could be carried out by highly professionalized
agents. In this last case, the torturers are most likely to have been 'zealots' – identifying themselves
with the state they serve, and neither activated by sadism nor inhibited by empathy.
So far, we have seen that torture is a difficult process to control. The magistrates in Salem were
unable to prevent themselves from accepting misinformation in a deceptive cycle because the threat
they faced was imaginary, and the means they had for verification non-existent. The FLN were much
better placed to verify information, but the rotten foundation laid by French misinformation led them
into deception as well. The French army in Algiers faced a real threat, and were armed with an
intelligence apparatus that should have allowed them to verify any misinformation to enter the system:
the result was a deceptive cycle that lost strategically what little it gained tactically. By examining the
95 The primary example of how this process operates is the story of Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber, the editor of the
antiwar newspaper L'Express who was called up to serve in the conflict. While Servan-Schreiber's experiences were
atypically publicized, the large number of conscripts who served and then returned home to share their experiences in
letters to editors and the antiwar movement increased the political costs of both torture, and the war more broadly.
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