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

Samuell Parris. 70 The strongest evidence of this is the fact that when Tituba confessed, it was not to the
maleficium that made up the common undertsading of witchcraft, or to the cunning-work that she had
in fact performed. Instead, Tituba confessed to being a member of a Satanic Conspiracy, a view that
persisted among the learned and the elites ever since the publication in the 15 th Century of the Malleus
Maleficarum. 71
The deceptive cycle that characterized the Salem witch trials arose from a false belief in
conspiracy, and the strategic environment that was generated as the Court attempted to uncover this
perceived threat to society. The result was an explosion of denunciations as the afflicted used the
antiempirical nature of conspiracy to denounce their enemies, and the confessors denounced others to
make themselves indispensible to the Court. This is the danger that torture for information contains,
and only the credible threat to investigate the stories told by the tortured – to make the absence of
torture contingent upon telling the truth – can prevent it from occurring. In Salem the use of spectral
testimony replaced this commitment to empiricism, allowing the Court's prior beliefs to become ever-
more entrenched with every confession. Newton's findings regarding the nature of eye-sight fatally
undermined spectral testimony, but the Court would not be convinced to ignore afflicted visions until a
critical mass of confessors began to recant – a process that could only occur once the incentive to
confess and denounce had already collapsed under the weight of an ever expanding population of
suspects. In the following chapters, I will examine the use of torture to uncover conspiracies that
actually exist, by authorities unburdened by beliefs in unempirical forms of evidence. These authorities
were in a position to verify coerced information to at least some degree: could they credibly threaten to
do so? Could they prevent the deceptive cycle from occurring?
70 That the Court found no obvious marks on her body is no bar to this hypothesis. Non-scarring methods were used on
slaves as a matter of course: scars signalled to prospective buyers that the slave was a trouble-maker, and so degraded
the value of the human 'asset.' (Rejali 2007)
71 See Chapter 2 for a larger discussion of this text and its impact on elite undertsnadings of witchcraft.
74