You Decide

…that information gleaned from torture is notoriously unreliable?

Deprived of heat, sleep and light, those accused of witchery in Scotland during the 1660s suffered thumbscrews, prodding and even the branks, a metal helmet outfitted with an inner iron (often spiked) tongue depressor. The tactics returned remarkable results, prompting one woman, Issobell Smyth, to confess that she’d slept with the devil himself, noting “his mouth and breath wery cold, and his body lyk clay …”

The branks may be gone, but many of the tactics—sleep deprivation, prodding, exposure to temperature extremes—are familiar. How about the confessions, though? Are they equally fantastic?

Let’s take the case of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, an al Qaeda operative captured as he fled the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in November 2001. Using an extra-judicial practice known as extraordinary rendition, the CIA transported the recalcitrant al-Libi to Egypt for further “questioning.” There, according to a later declassified CIA cable, his Egyptian jailers allegedly tortured him by placing him in a “small box” for an estimated 17 hours and later “punched [him] for 15 minutes."

Eventually al-Libi coughed up a story that would become one of the primary justifications for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq: Saddam Hussein, al-Libi told his torturers, had trained al Qaeda fighters to build bombs.

The intelligence, allegedly shared only after the Egyptian handlers tortured al-Libi, quickly moved up the American chain of command, and in an October 2002 speech, President George Bush said: “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and gases."

Of course, we now know that this information came directly from the torture chamber. We also know, after al-Libi recanted the story two years later in July 2004, that there was no link between Iraq and al Qaeda. Al-Libi concocted the false story in Egypt while he was being tortured.

Worse, it’s not like al-Libi was going anywhere. He was in custody, where his questioners, using less aggressive interrogation methods, might have slowly broken al-Libi’s defenses, in part by building rapport, and thereby gradually assembling more and more information—information that was accurate, actionable and ethically defensible.

Torture, by contrast, is an end-sum game: Once tortured, the only way to get a subject to give more information is by ratcheting up the pain. And although al-Libi is just one man, he is not alone in his response to torture: Whereas the strong will endure, the weak will say anything—including falsehoods—to stop the pain.

…that intelligence gathered via torture isn’t really so flawed?

It’s a truism these days that tortured prisoners will produce faulty or even fabricated information. The logic goes like this: Pain, or the fear of pain, motivates people to say whatever they think will make the pain stop fastest—regardless of its veracity.

The thing is, there’s not a lot of evidence to support this claim. Populations of tortured prisoners are rarely presented to the psychological community for study (indeed, such a study would present an ethical dilemma all its own), and the evidence that such confessions are unreliable remains largely anecdotal.

Certainly, torture has yielded its share of bunk intelligence, but what about the case of Abdul Hakim Murad?

A Pakistani member of al Qaeda, Murad was arrested after he and his cohort, Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, inadvertently set fire to his Manila apartment in 1995.

Although the police found computer disks, tubs of nitric acid, sulfuric acid and other evidence of Murad’s bomb-making enterprise, he refused to talk. So it was that Murad’s interrogators broke his ribs, forced water down his throat and extinguished cigarettes on his testicles.

After several weeks of this rough treatment, Murad confessed to the so-called Bojinka Plot. He told his torturers that they had planned to detonate bombs on 11 international flights. He gave them names and locations as well as the dates of the planned attacks. He confessed that they also planned to highjack a 12th plane and fly it into CIA headquarters. He even told them of a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II, who visited the Philippines one week after police arrested Murad.

Authorities soon arrested Yousef in Pakistan as well as a third conspirator, Wali Khan Amin Shah.

All three were later found guilty, largely on the strength of Murad’s confession. Like it or not, torture was instrumental in jailing three active terrorists, foiling future plots and likely saving countless lives.