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

the threats they face are real, where the state is informed, and has a collective interest in precluding the
absorption of false information. Rather than finding an additive relationship between the state's
information environment and the presence or absence of conspiracies, I find an apparently
multiplicative one. While the informed French in Algeria were able to limit the damage done to their
own side done by the cycle of denunciations (while still ultimately losing the war as a result of it), the
less informed in Americans were to fall hook, line and sinker for what – in retrospect – was an obvious
lie told under torture. When the threat is imaginary, the relationship appears to have been reversed. In
Salem, the lack of good information outside the confessions of the accused led to an explosion of
denunciations, but one which was attenuated once the pressures unleashed by this deceptive cycle lead
the elites in charge to reexamine their concepts of acceptable evidence. For the FLN, however, the
existence of a powerful intelligence apparatus did not prevent the colonels from giving precedence to
information gleaned through force: in the end, the cycle of denunciations was brought to a halt only
with the murder of the authorities themselves by their own men, and only after doing irreparable
damage to the Army of National Liberation itself. Whereas a strong information environment appears
to have ameliorated torture's ill effects when the threat is real, it appears also to have accelerated the
acceptance of tortured information when the threat does not truly exist.
In all cases, there are indications that even informed states with an interest in verifying tortured
information were susceptible to deception, most dramatically in situations where states were presented
with a choice between trusting the verification process or the words of the tortured. In the most benign
case, the French spent three days torturing a locksmith connected with the FLN before learning the
location of the main bomb factory at Impasse de la Grénade – three days they would have saved had
they bothered to translate the ream of documents captured with the locksmith that provided the
location. (Rejali, p. 489) In the most extreme case, the United States allowed itself to be convinced of
the existence of training camps in Iraq set up by the Hussein regime to instruct al Qa'ida on chemical
warfare by the tortured testimony of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi despite considerable reason to distrust his
report – reasons outlines extensively by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February of 2002, more
than a year before the invasion of Iraq. (DITSUM #044-02) The implication is serious: while the
presence of an actual threat, as well as an informed state are necessary conditions of the successful use
of torture for information, they are insufficient. The state must also be willing to use its capacity to
investigate, even when this is costly, and even when it contradicts the state's prior beliefs. As we have
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