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

torture as a failure based on this fact alone would be tendentious in the extreme: it would be the
equivalent of denouncing surgery as a practice because the patient eventually died. And indeed a
strong case can be made that the French colonial project was doomed from the start: caught between
nine million Arab and Berber Algerians (with little property and less political representation) and one
million European settlers, the French were unlikely to have found any political formula that would have
satisfied both a politicized majority demanding equality as French citizens and a settler community
whose socio-economic position depended on preventing this majority from gaining political power.
Similarly, the fact that torture had the effect of alienating Algerian sympathies and strengthening
political support for the FLN cannot by itself prove torture unwise as a policy: the political effects of
torture might after all have been minimized by a state careful to keep the focus of the torture regime on
actual terrorists. Unless we have reason to believe that the torture of innocents (defined as non-FLN)
was a direct implication of the processes of torture itself, then we should dismiss it as potentially the
result of the French military's political autonomy in Algeria.
If we are to assess torture as a system of gaining information then we must confront torture on
its own terms. In this chapter I examine the direct effects of torture by focusing on how well torture
was able to distinguish truth from falsehood. The idea is to weigh the benefits of using torture – the
true information gained from the practice – against the misinformation that may have entered the
system, following the logic outlined in the second chapter. The model does not imply that torture can
never work: if the captive is faced with enough prospective pain, and the state can credibly commit to
verifying the information given, then the rational captive is best off telling the truth. The problem lies
in generating this credible commitment to base the decision to torture on the outcome of that
verification process. Without this commitment, the rational captive will lie, regardless of what he
knows. While we cannot measure this credibility directly, we can proxy it by examining how the
torturers dealt with those who were ignorant. If torture works as a system, then we should expect the
following result: the original population of captives, composed of some ratio of knowledgeable to
ignorant captives, should contract over time as the ignorant are weeded out (the state ignores their
revelations) and the knowledgeable confess. An expansion in the number of captives, however, would
be an indication that torture has failed to weed out the ignorant (who must lie) – and if the torturer
cannot distinguish truth from lies, then we must assume that he knowledgeable captives lied as often as
they were able.
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