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

fact come verbatim from a 1957 journal article explaining the very ordinariness of the Chinese tactics:
the only alteration was that its title, “Chart 1 – Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual
Compliance,” was edited out.(New York Times, 02/07/2008) These tactics are now quite familiar to
Americans who have followed the GTMO and Abu Ghraib scandals: isolation, sleep deprivation,
prolonged interrogation and constraint, over exertion, threats against family, and degradation.
(Biderman, p.619) But these techniques had not been developed for the purposes of gathering
intelligence: they were means of generating compliance, a crucial distinction. Whether a detainee
complies with an order to confess falsely is immediately knowable to his malefactor: whether a
detainee has given truthful information is unknowable absent an intelligence apparatus to investigate
his claims. By forgetting the origin of these tactics, the interrogators at Guantanamo were also
forgetting the very real limits on their effectiveness, even for compliance: of the 78 airmen tortured by
the Chinese, over half refused to confess at all: many of the remaining confessed only partially. (Rejali,
p. 86)
If torture relies then on investigation in order to make the detainee's choice as clear as possible
– cooperate or suffer – then the biggest indication that torture is unlikely to have worked systematically
can be found in the large number of detainees with few connections to al Qaeda, and the many who
were later released outright: if the intelligence gathering capabilities of the US in gathering detainees in
the first place was as compromised as it appears to have been, then we must question the effectiveness
of the military in making certain that the information collected was truthful. Worse, there are claims
that the administration ignored cautions from a senior CIA analysts, invited to GTMO to figure out why
the interrogators there were gaining so little intelligence from the estimated 600 detainees, that “a full
third of the camp's detainees were there by mistake,” a view shared by the Commanding General,
Michael Dunlavey. 99 The indications that confessions obtained under torture were then used to
interrogate others raises the possibility that torture may have convinced the US of false information that
was subsequently reinforced by other coerced revelations. And the tactics used at GTMO were not to
stay there: after the invasion of Iraq and the establishment of the detention center at Abu Ghraib, they
would be transferred along with Major General Miller, leading to the imprisonment and interrogation
not of hundreds but of thousands of individuals, as well as to the infamous pictures of military police
acting out their own fantasies of power and domination over the subject bodies of Iraqis.
99 The information quoted comes from Mayer (2008), as related in the Washington Post, “A Blind Eye to Guantanamo?
Book Says White House Ignored CIA on Detainees' Innocence.” July 12 th , 2008.
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