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

Padilla was accused by KSM of plotting to blow up apartments in an unidentified city – a far cry from
the 'dirty bomb' plot for which has was arrested; and the information leading to the capture of Hambali
and his JI crew came primarily from the interrogation of Majid Khan, who was already in custody.
Finally, there is reason to believe that a good portion of the information revealed by KSM was
in fact false, or at least exaggerated. Iyman Faris was accused by KSM of plotting to cut down the
Brooklyn Bridge with a blowtorch, a physical impossibility. While Faris would initially plea guilty to
providing material support to al Qaeda, he would claim he had done so in order to avoid a life sentence
or being declared an enemy combatant, and to secure a book deal. (New York Times, 29/10/2003)
While this is certainly a self-serving claim on Faris' part, it does fit well with his willingness to
cooperate with the FBI. Furthermore, while the capture of Hambali and his crew certainly had a
beneficial effect in preventing potential future terror attacks, the plot for which they were captured had
been disrupted the previous year (the Heathrow plot). Before the use of the most severe tortures, the
information given by KSM had tended to be “outdated, inaccurate, or incomplete.” (OIG, p. 91) Once
the Agency began torturing in earnest, however, the number of intelligence reports he provided
increased greatly, but the intelligence value of what he revealed is disputed. “Some intelligence
officers say that many of Mr. Mohammed's statements proved exaggerated or false.” (New York Times,
04/10/2007) KSM himself claimed to the Red Cross that the information he revealed while being
waterboarded was deliberately false, and “wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts
being placed in the US.” (ICRC, 2007:37)
The chronology of the torture also provides some important clues as to how coercive
interrogation functions. Defenders of the use of torture have argued that KSM only began cooperating
after a month of being tortured, and in particular after the use of the waterboard. (Washington Post,
29/08/2009) Other sources inside the intelligence community however have argued that “the CIA's
initial interrogators were not experts on Mr. Mohammed's background or al Qaeda, and it took about a
month to get such an expert to the secret prison.” (New York Times, 04/10/2007) Both of these
accounts state that KSM's cooperation began at about the same time, but they are based on two very
different causal arguments: the former arguing that the accumulated pain of 183 applications of the
waterboard, in addition to sleep deprivation and stress positions inter alia are what led KSM eventually
to begin cooperation; the latter argues that it was the presence of expert interrogators who would be
able to identify when KSM was providing misinformation that did the trick. The former argument is
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