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

this area, while the FLN who faced them had their own spies penetrating much of the colonial state
structure. In contrast, the United States confronted an insurgency in Iraq (as well as a coordinated
terrorist movement world wide) with significant problems for gathering intelligence. In contrast to the
French experience in Algeria, the United States could not make use of a loyal ethnic minority
(comparable to the Pieds Noirs), nor was it capable of generating information through the use of a
block warden system – instead it was forced to rely heavily on a reformed Iraqi army and police force
that offered considerable opportunities for infiltration and cooptation by the insurgency. (Keath, 2004;
Vincent, 2005) This problem was compounded by a chronic shortage of arabic-speaking analysts in the
military, leaving US forces reliant on Iraqi translators who, along with the newly instituted Iraqi police
force, found themselves easy targets for the insurgency. (Diamond, 2004) In Salem, there was little to
no ability to ascertain facts independent of torture for more philosophical reasons: not only was
witchcraft a crime which often lacked physical evidence, but the very state of science itself prevented
much of the 'evidence' presented to the court from being evaluated in its proper light. 33
The third condition that underlies the data concerns the reliability of the torturers: the potential
for an agent-principle dilemma. The torturer's incentives will only be to generate true information
when truth is what the state rewards him for generating. If the state cannot separate truth from fiction,
or rewards the torturer for the sheer amount of information he generates, then the torturer is best off
accepting anything the captive reveals. What this implies is that the same information asymmetry that
poses an issue for torture for information between the captive and the state also exists between the state
and the torturer. In Salem this was not at issue: the magistrates stood little to gain from maximizing the
number of accused, as opposed to revealing the satanic conspirators. 34 Similarly, the torturers of the
FLN had no incentive to over-accuse: every execution meant another FLN soldier unavailable to fight
the French. The United States engaged in torture during the War on Terror with varied institutional
ability to reign in this agent-principle dilemma, ranging from the Central Intelligence Agency at the
most reliable to the National Guard at the least institutionalized extreme. The French in Algeria, on the
other hand, combated their own enemies with a conscripted army: with the exception of the elite para
33 Interestingly, it as precisely a scientific breakthrough that would provide much of the ammunition to end the trials:
specifically, Newton's recent experiments on eye-sight would delegitimate much of the testimony on which the trials
depended.
34 Unlike the witch trials on the continent, the property of the accused in Salem was not seized and distributed among the
court, except to pay for their own imprisonment. European witch hunts were marked by considerable financial gains for
successful judges and 'witch-finders.' (Currie, 1968)
33