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

that is, deliberately taking advantage of the administration's a priori beliefs. (Id.) A motive for this
deception is not hard to find. Firstly, by telling the interrogators what their bosses wanted to hear, al-
Libi might be able to gain freedom from torture, at least for some time. But it is also possible that al-
Libi saw manipulating the US into a war with Iraq as a means of benefiting al Qaeda, in a sense
replicating the jihadi movement's greatest victory in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union by bleeding
the US in an endless (and expensive) war of occupation. In fact, a former jihadist who claims to have
been a mole for MI5, MI6, and the French intelligence service (GDSE) argues that this was precisely
the case. “Omar Nasiri” trained at Khalden under al-Libi where he received training in bombings,
assassinations, withstanding torture and lying under interrogation. He claims that, when asked by
another jihadist where the “best country to fight the jihad,” al-Libi replied “Iraq,” because it was the
“weakest” Muslim country. (Standard, 23/11/2006) Furthermore, Hussein's regime was a secular
dictatorship – exactly the sort of corrupted state that al Qaeda sought to replace with an Islamic
Republic: al-Libi “knew what his interrogators wanted, and was happy to give it to them. He wanted to
see Saddam toppled even more than the Americans did.” 111 If the administration's goal was simply to
invade Iraq, and saw torture as a means to generate false confessions that it did not need, then this
would imply a commonality of interests between the US and al Qaeda – the simpler explanation is that
al-Libi's story fit the administration's prior beliefs sufficiently well that even analysis that recognized
the canard was ignored.
The case of al-Libi is critical for understanding how torture operates in the real world, for
several reasons. Firstly, the detainee in question did in fact have intelligence crucial to the conduct of
the War on Terror: other detainees, like Abu Zubaydah, had no intelligence, and thus guaranteeing that
the interrogator (when it accepted their story) would be accepting misinformation. So torture could
have worked in al-Libi's case. Secondly, the US was in a position to have investigated the detainee's
claims – and in fact had done so, as we saw in the DIA analysis (DITSUM 044-02). Thirdly, the
interrogators were conducted by Egyptians, whose state has a long history of using torture during
interrogations: it is therefore exceedingly unlikely that the torture was not painful enough. 112 Fourthly,
111 The quote is taken from Nasiri's book, “Inside the Jihad: My Life with al Qaeda: a Spy's Story.” Perseus Books Group,
NY (2006), p. 230. It is important to note that none of the intelligence services mentioned above has taken issue with
Nasiri's claim to have been an informant, and at least one member of the CIA has spoken highly of his work as a spy,
stating that Nasiri's claims track with his own knowledge as the former head of the CIA's bin Laden desk from .
( Washington Post, 20/03/2008;New York Times, 17/11/2006)
112 While we do not know exactly how al-Libi was tortured in Egypt, there are many stories regarding the nature of
Egyptian interrogation. The State Department noted in a 2002 report that Egyptian detainees faced being “stripped and
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