Effectiveness of torture for interrogation

One early writer on the ineffectiveness of torture was Friedrich Spee (1591-1635). Spee was a German Jesuit priest, professor, and poet, most noted as an opponent of trials for witchcraft. Spee was the first person in his time to present strong written and spoken arguments against torture, especially with regards to its unreliability in obtaining "truth" from someone undergoing painful questioning.[1] It was found that subjects would make up stories if it meant the torture would cease.

After the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, the Japanese military tortured a captured American P-51 fighter pilot, Marcus McDilda, in order to discover how many atomic bombs the Allies had and what the future targets were. McDilda, who knew nothing about the atomic bomb nor the Manhattan Project, "confessed" under torture that the U.S. had 100 atomic bombs and that Tokyo and Kyoto were the next targets. McDilda's false confession may have swayed the Japanese leaders' decision to surrender.[2][3]

Chinese interrogators tortured U.S. Air Force prisoners of war during the Korean War with the specific goal of eliciting false confessions.[4] After the war, these false confessions led to allegations that the airmen had been "brainwashed", so the United States interviewed the former prisoners of war to collect information on the torture techniques employed, publishing their results in 1957.[5] These torture techniques were incorporated into the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program to train servicemembers to resist torture.[4]

FM 34-52 Intelligence Interrogation, the United States Army field manual, explains that torture "is a poor technique that yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say what he thinks the interrogator wants to hear."[6] Not only is torture ineffective at gathering reliable information, but it also increases the difficulty of gathering information from a source in the future.

False information about a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda was extracted from Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi through torture[7][8] and was cited by the George W. Bush Administration in the months preceding its 2003 invasion of Iraq.[9][10] That information was frequently repeated by members of the Bush Administration, although reports from both the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) strongly questioned its credibility, suggesting that al-Libi was "intentionally misleading" interrogators.[11]

Since the revelations in 2004 and 2008 that the President George W. Bush administration authorized the use of torture in interrogations, and that United States personnel have used such practices in interrogations related to the 9/11 attacks and al-Qaeda, both at black sites and at Guantánamo Bay detention camp, discussions on this topic have been heated. In commenting on the use and effectiveness of various torture methods, with a focus on waterboarding, former U.S. Director of National Intelligence, Dennis C. Blair, wrote in 2009 that "high value information came from interrogations in which these methods were used".[12] However a Senate Committee that investigated claims of useful information being extracted from suspects that underwent enhanced interrogation concluded that critical and valuable information was not obtained using these methods.[13] The 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture also concluded that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately impeded oversight, as well as misrepresenting the effectiveness of torture as an interrogation technique to policymakers and to the public through coordinated leaking of false information.[14]^:4[15]

Alex Knapp, a staff writer at Forbes, wrote the following in 2009, "Time and time again, people with actual experience with interrogating terror suspects and actual experience and knowledge about the effectiveness of torture techniques have come out to explain that they are ineffective and that their use threatens national security more than it helps".[16] He had written an article about an FBI interrogator, who noted their practice did not include torture; FBI agents had registered strong disapproval of the US military approach.[16]

Annette Sisco argues that "the [torture] techniques... are specifically designed to make captives pliable and dependent. They are designed to get prisoners to say whatever you want them to say".[17] Many torture survivors report revealing false or incomplete information since their goal was to satisfy the torturer and end the suffering, not to reveal information.[18]

The book Pediatricians at War: the Dual-Loyalties Challenge by Fritz Allhoff explains that "to test the effectiveness of torture researchers would have to ignore the consent of the research subjects".[19]