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

problem by the authorities – and yet the Court of Oyer and Terminer, the FLN, the French Army, and
the CIA all managed to pollute their pool of suspects in just this fashion.
Most strikingly, the ability to investigate does not appear to have played much role in insulating
the state from these pernicious effects. While we can understand the Villagers and Jurists at Salem for
not understanding the properties of human sight, and the dangerous nature of spectral evidence, the
highly modern and sophisticated armies of France in the 1950s, and the deeply intelligence oriented US
military in the 2000s both fell victim to the same pitfalls of misinformation and the vicious circles of
denunciation. One potential argument in favor of torture for information yet remains to consider. What
if the problems found in these cases were not the fault of torture per se, but rather the result of ruthless
torturers attempting to gain advancement by inflating the amount of 'information' they extracted? What
if this is simply a question of finding better, or more professional agents? This argument is strong – but
it is based on precisely the information dilemma I identify as the reason why interrogational torture is
likely to fail. If the state cannot distinguish between the true information that the torturer extracts from
the misinformation he throws in to pad his reports, then there can be no hope for torture as a system of
gathering intelligence: the cynical torturer will always win over the careful and conscientious one. In
the case of the United States, the greater professionalism of CIA torturers did not prevent
misinformation from corrupting the system anymore than at Abu Ghraib.
Can Torture be Made to Work?
The ethical case for informational torture, exemplified by the ticking-bomb scenario, fails
utterly once we consider the logic of torture itself. The less time the authorities have to make use of the
information gleaned from coercion, the less incentive they have to investigate its veracity, and the less
incentive the captive has to tell the truth. The less time-sensitive the information required, the less
torture can be supported ethically – since the prime reason to torture has traditionally been assumed to
be its ability to gather information more quickly than more empirical methods. Likewise, the
assumption that torture can operate as a substitute for investigation is untrue: without the ability to vet
tortured information sufficiently costlessly, the authority cannot credibly commit to doing so, allowing
the captive to take advantage of the information asymmetry to plant misinformation. But while these
qualifications force us to reexamine how we think about torture, don't they also provide us with a
potential path towards “correct” torture? Would it be possible to design a torture system that took these
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