鈥淚F YOU torture the data long enough,鈥� the saying goes, 鈥渋t will confess to anything.鈥� Although this is a problem for scientists, the stakes are higher for torturers. If tortured people really will tell you anything, how do you know when they are telling the truth?
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Why Torture Doesn鈥檛 Work has a specific origin, says , professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland. In 2009, he read an article about the release of , legal documents prepared for the US federal authorities on the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation, binding in stress positions, and other 鈥渆nhanced interrogation鈥� techniques.
Morality aside, O鈥橫ara wanted to know if there was credible science that showed torture worked. The answer, it turns out, is no. The reality is that 鈥渢he intelligence obtained through torture is so paltry, the signal-to-noise ratio so low, that proponents of torture are left with an indefensible case鈥�. Advocates defend torture with an 鈥渁d hoc mixture of anecdote, cherry-picked stories and entirely counterfactual scenarios鈥�, he says.
Controlled studies on the effectiveness of torture would be morally abhorrent. But there is a lot of information on the psychological and physiological effects of severe pain, fear, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, confinement and near-drowning. Some studies, such as those on the effects of sensory deprivation, used healthy volunteers. Others were conducted during the training of combat soldiers.
There is also a small amount of literature on the severe, long-term effects of torture on those who survive it, and work on the efficacy of police-interrogation techniques, which has produced insights into the psychology of false confessions 鈥� alarmingly easy to produce.
As O鈥橫ara emphasises, torture does not produce reliable information largely because of the severity with which it impairs the ability to think. Extreme pain, cold, sleep deprivation and fear of torture itself all damage memory, mood and cognition. Torture does not persuade people to make a reasoned decision to cooperate, but produces panic, dissociation, unconsciousness and long-term neurological damage. It also produces an intense desire to keep talking to prevent further torture.
O鈥橫ara quotes an intelligence officer鈥檚 story about a 60-year-old torture survivor in Cambodia: 鈥淗e told his interrogators everything they wanted to know, including the truth. In torture, he confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite, and a CIA spy to a Catholic bishop and the King of Cambodia鈥檚 son. He was actually just a school teacher whose crime was that he once spoke French.鈥�
鈥淥ne survivor confessed to being everything from a hermaphrodite to the King of Cambodia鈥檚 son鈥�
Interrogators often escalate torture when they think a suspect is withholding information or lying, but there is no good evidence that interrogators are better than the rest of us at detecting lies. In fact, there is evidence that when people are trained as interrogators, they become more likely to think others are lying to them. This belief can lead to alarming errors, whereby people are tortured because their torturer wrongly believes they are lying. New technologies to detect lies do not work either, says O鈥橫ara.
Why Torture Doesn鈥檛 Work is a valuable book. O鈥橫ara builds his case like a prosecutor, citing scientific studies and relentlessly poking holes in absurdities and inconsistencies in documents such as the 鈥淭orture Memos鈥�. Whether science matters to those who defend torture is another matter, as O鈥橫ara knows: their motivation is often punitive, not practical. But once torture is imposed, the consequences, he says, are that it will be 鈥渋neffective, pointless, morally appalling, and unpredictable in its outcomes鈥�.
(Image: Vlad Sokhin/Panos)
Harvard University Press
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淪ecrets and lies鈥�
