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

2.1. Introduction
CHAPTER 2
THE LOGIC OF TORTURE:
Why Shouldn't Torture Work?
Torture is a shadowy process, cloaked in secrecy by the states that use it. Both political reality
and morality forbid the presence of the public scientist in the torture chamber, and no ethically viable
experiment could be conducted that would allow us to study coercive interrogation in its fearsomeness.
Likewise, the fact that states do not publicize the use of torture, much less its effectiveness in given
cases of torture, means that the raw data for statistical regression simply foes not exist in a usable form.
Crucially, the most important variable in the process of torture, pain, is entirely subjective: even if we
could know whether or not a captive was telling the truth, we could not know how much pain it had
taken to force the truth from his lips. Consequently, analyzing torture is an indirect process that
depends heavily on puzzling out abstractly what torture should look like, and how it should operate.
By examining the logic of torture, focusing on how torture should work as a rational process, we can
deduce the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful torture. Let us begin by defining torture.
Because of the inherently subjective nature of pain, torture has been a difficult phenomenon to
define. Defining torture as a specific set of behaviors runs a dual risk. Firstly, since no list could be
complete, any technique not listed could be declared not to be torture by the unscrupulous. Secondly,
techniques that would certainly be considered torture under some conditions might not be under others
– for example, the application of electric current might indicate torture, shock therapy, or sexual
stimulation depending on to and by whom it is performed. Alternatively, defining torture by the
amount of pain it involves is dangerous since pain is unmeasurable empirically: adjudicating torture
would then become literally a case of the captive's word against the torturer's. 8 Instead, I focus on an
instrumental and contextual definition of torture, one that obviates the need for limitation by severity or
8 The peculiar danger of this definition of torture can be seen in the argument put forward by members of the George W.
Bush administration that only pain rising to the level of “death, organ failure, or permanent damage” counted as torture –
a definition that allowed such previously uncontroversial examples of torture as waterboarding to be recharacterized as
merely 'abuse.' (OLC, p. 38; New York Times 03/04/2008) That waterboarding provides the captive precisely the
experience of dying was no problem, since absent death there would be no way of measuring the pain produced.
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