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

from fiction, and also in the time necessary to do so. This is important, since it is not enough for the
state to be able to verify information – the state must credibly threaten to do so, and to condition torture
on whether or not the captive appears to have lied. If the captive expects to be tortured regardless of
what he says, then he has no reason to cooperate at all. If the state cannot credibly threaten to verify
his story, then the captive is best off revealing information consonant with the torturer's prior beliefs,
regardless of truth. But if the torturer believes that the captive has told the truth, especially when the
information is time-sensitive, then he is best off not verifying once the captive appears to have broken –
making the threat to verify incredible. This is true as well when the state rewards torturers for the
quantity – as opposed to the quality – of information they generate. Torture acts as an inversion of the
lie detector, which only works when the subject believes that it does: torture only ends when the
interrogator believes that it has worked.
In the following pages, I attempt to come to grips with the logic of interrogational torture by
examining it as a rational process and creating an informal model in order to make testable predictions
about how torture operates, when it should be likely to succeed or fail, and what success or failure will
look like. I then test these predictions against three primary cases: the Salem Witch-Trials, the contest
between the FLN (National Liberation Front) and the French army during the Algerian War for
Independence, and the War on Terror. The goal of this exercise is to lay bare the contradictions that
ensnare interrogational torture, and reveal the ways in which the information asymmetries that exists by
necessity – whether the captive knows some useful truth, what the nature of that truth is, and how much
pain the captive is actually undergoing – undermine and harm the state that makes use of it. In this
way, I hope to contribute something to the ongoing debate over whether, and under what circumstances,
torture can be justified by a state under threat: rather than argue that torture is immoral (as it certainly
is), I wish to show how it can become counterproductive. At the extreme, torture in practice stands the
drama of torture on its head: rather than forcing the captive to reveal the unvarnished truth to the eager
interrogator, torture under the wrong circumstances can become a means of transmitting
misinformation from the captive to the state. Above all, torture relies on the state having access to
strong information in order to catch the captive when he lies: but this reduces at the same time the
potential for torture to teach the state anything new at all. Torture is simply subject to the logic of
coercion more broadly: the threat of punishment must be credible, and must be predicated on
misbehavior. If the subject can lie and get away with it, then no amount of torture will suffice to reveal
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