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

Ghraib. (Schlesinger, p.60) The bureaucratic paralysis also meant that prisoners were difficult to track,
leading to multiple escapes, including by high Value Detainees, and that detainees were rarely released,
even after having been cleared of any charges. (Taguba, p. 25) This bureaucratic morass becomes even
more troubling when we consider that an estimated “70 to 90 percent of the persons deprived of their
liberty in Iraq had been arrested by mistake.” (ICRC 2004:8)
A good indication of the ability of the intelligence forces at Abu Ghraib to adequately
investigate the information given to them under interrogation can be found in how prisoners whom it
had been determined were not a threat to the Coalition were treated. If MI officers had high confidence
in these assessments, deciding that the detainee was ignorant or had told all he knew, then we would
expect the detainee to be released, not least in order to free up much needed space at the over crowded
prison. In reality, however, this rarely occurred: detainees were often held for months after being
cleared for release. In fact, 60% of the total detainee population was categorized as those who had
committed “Crimes against the Coalition” but who had no intelligence value and no longer posed a
significant threat: the “Detainee Releasing Authority,” Maj General Barbara Fast “routinely denied the
board's recommendations to release detainees in this category who (…) clearly met the requirement for
release.” (Taguba, p. 25) The authorities could not be certain that the detainees had told all they knew,
or that apparently innocent detainees were not actually combatants. (Schlesinger, p. 61) This
uncertainty was to influence the decisions of bureaucrats and interrogators at Guantanamo, Afghanistan
and Iraq alike: “In talking to some of the officers at Kandahar and Bagram … they all talk about how
there was this great fear among them, those who were going to be putting their signatures to the release
of prisoners,great fear that they were somehow going to manage to release somebody who would later
turn out to be the 20 th hijacker.” 101
There is reason to believe that the use of interrogations applied to a very large swath of the
detainee population, regardless of participation in the insurgency. As related by Col. Larry Wilkinson,
chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell during the first George W. Bush administration,
military intelligence and the CIA had begun to develop “an ad hoc intelligence philosophy” that would
be used to justify the holding and continued interrogation of those detainees known to be innocent of
any ties to terrorism, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, known as the “mosaic philosophy” - the military
101 Excerpt from an interview on National Public Radio of 'Chris Mackey' – the pseudonym of a US interrogator in
Afghanistan 2002. Quoted in Danner (2009).
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