OPINION
Monday, January 19, 2015 5
Was it Worth it?
A Critical Review of the Effectiveness of CIA Torture
tracey leigh dowdeswell › contributor
W
i t h t h e r e c e n t release of the
U.S. Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence’s report on torture committed by the Central Intelligence Agency,
there has been a renewed debate on the effectiveness of torture in uncovering actionable intelligence.
Torture is depicted as producing useful information
previously unknown to the interrogator, and this
must then be balanced against the damage done to
our democratic values by engaging in an inherently
illiberal practice. One common example is the “ticking time-bomb scenario,” a thought experiment in
which it is imagined that a suspect has direct knowledge of a bomb that will kill in large numbers, and
who is reluctant to disclose its location. Torture, it is
argued, is a morally justified solution in such a scenario, one that will uncover information about future
attacks and save lives. This view has been advanced
by such leading American jurists as Alan Dershowitz
and Richard Posner. Costanzo and Gerrity describe
the torture narrative promoted by Dershowitz as one
that reconfigures the torturer as a “principled, heroic
figure who reluctantly uses torture to save lives,”
while the government seeks to portray torture as a
regulated, controlled precision process that is only
used as a last resort in cases of extremity.
An alternative way to characterize torture is to
view it as part of a broader system of social control. The real value of torture lies not in its ability to
uncover factually accurate information from recalcitrant individuals, but in its ability to construct an
image of our enemies as morally unworthy, as lacking in basic humanity and human motivations, and
therefore as outside the scope of morality and justice. Einolf, in his historical review of the use of torture, has found that torture is primarily used against
those who are not full members of society, such as
racial and ethnic minorities, slaves, and prisoners of
war, and that torture is generally only used when the
state itself is perceived to be under threat. For example, the use of torture in the Middle Ages against those
suspected of heresy and witchcraft was highly successful in supporting this worldview by extracting
confessions and convincing those tortured to name
other guilty parties; this created an ever-expanding
circle of new confessions and new perpetrators to
interrogate. Langbein states that torture sustained
a belief in the dangers of witchcraft, despite the fact
that the falsity of the information produced through
torture was widely recognized and commented upon.
Similarly, the third century A.D. Roman jurist Ulpian
recognized that information obtained under torture
was not reliable, even as the practice was extended
from slaves to the lower classes in general. In modern
times, the Khmer Rouge of Cambodia used torture
to provide substantial false evidence of a widespread
conspiracy being perpetrated by the (non-existent)
Kampuchean Worker’s Party. In this view, the real
value of torture lies in its ability to reconstruct and
reinforce the state’s public narrative of the essential
goodness of the established social order, and to promote the legitimacy of its brutal suppression of those
who would threaten this.
Research in the social sciences supports this view
of torture, and several studies have found that the
more coercive the interrogation, the less accurate and
truthful is the information obtained from detainees.
Janeff-Bulman states that torture causes dissociation,
leading detainees to become unwilling or unable to
cooperate, and decreases the chances that they will
be able to provide reliable information. Studies of U.S.
POWs who were tortured in the Korean War (19501953) found that violent methods of interrogation had
been less effective
in eliciting information from the
soldiers than were
non-violent methods. Costanzo and
G er r it y rev iew
numerous studies that show that coercive interrogation techniques
have produced false confessions in a surprisingly large
number of cases. The stronger the level of coercion
used, the greater the likelihood that false confessions
will result; similarly, the longer the interrogation
continues, the greater is the probability that any confessions produced will be false. A recent study by
Goodman-Delahunty et al. of interrogations of high
value detainees concluded that the use of coercive
tactics, and physical coercion in particular, were negatively correlated with detainee cooperation, the disclosure of information, and the speed of disclosure.
The Senate Report concerning the CIA’s enhanced
interrogation program also supports this second view
of torture, and contradicts the thesis that torture provided objectively correct inf ܛX][ۈ ]