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

pains inflicted are sufficiently painful. 27 If we assume that states are rational actors engaged in a search
for true information, then we are hard pressed to explain the fact that these states have not apparently
worked to ensure that the tortures they use actually provide truth. Torture has evolved under pressure,
but not in the direction of greater effectiveness from an intelligence gathering standpoint.
If direct and indirect empirical investigations are problematic and limited (at least at this point
in time), then how are we to identify how torture might work? There are two major paths towards
explaining torture: the first is psychological, the second rational. Psychological approaches examine
the effects of torture on mental processes – the ability of torturees to remember and reveal true
information. The results have not been comforting for proponents of torture. In a review of recent
findings on the effects of stress on memory and other neural functions, Shane O'Mara (2009) reports
that torture (and other forms of traumatic stress) can have the affect of impairing a subject's ability to
recall information from long-term memory – where the information sought by the state is most
certainly kept – as well as of impairing a subject's ability to learn and of limiting the subject's ability to
separate truthful memories from implanted fictions – an effect known as confabulation. 28 In other
words, torture might well give with one hand while taking with the other: the greater the pain, the
greater the captive's incentive to talk, but the lesser the captive's ability to cooperate usefully.
Techniques in this vein would include extended solitary confinement, truth serums, sleep deprivation,
as well as 'brain washing'. Interestingly, these techniques were investigated by the Central Intelligence
Agency in the aftermath of the Korean War. During this conflict, military and intelligence leaders were
shocked to see American POWs confessing on camera to committing war crimes. What was so
disturbing was the fact that the POWs exhibited no signs of torture, and the confessions (which were
untrue) were seemingly voluntary. The truth was far more prosaic: as reported by the Wolff-Hinkel
report (1953), the Chinese had simply made use of techniques “known to police systems all over the
world, and many of them are still in use at the present day.” (Rejali, p. 69) Similar experiments
attempting to use sensory deprivation as a means of breaking down and recreating psyches resulted in
little of use for interrogators: personalities could be broken down, but could not be remade. (Rejali pp.
370-1) Research on 'regression' – whereby the subject is kept in total isolation until the mind begins to
weaken, leading to an identification with authority figures, as well as a desire to please them – has
27 In this sense, we may have been mistaking the trees (torture) for the forest (pain). More on this distinction below.
28 The relevant citations are from Kim and Diamond (2002), Ulrich-Lai and Herman (2009), Arnsten (2009), Nutt and
Malizia (2004), Sauro et al. (2003), Turner et al. (2008) and Morgan et al. (2006).
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