Why Torture Doesn’t Work

The Neuroscience of Interrogation

Shane O'Mara

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780674743908
• eBook ISBN: 9780674915534
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminal Law
• Index: Biological Sciences

Torture is banned because it is cruel and inhumane. But as Shane O'Mara writes in this account of the human brain under stress, another reason torture should never be condoned is because it does not work the way torturers assume it does.

In countless films and TV shows such as Homeland and 24, torture is portrayed as a harsh necessity. If cruelty can extract secrets that will save lives, so be it. CIA officers and others conducted torture using precisely this justification. But does torture accomplish what its defenders say it does? For ethical reasons, there are no scientific studies of torture. But neuroscientists know a lot about how the brain reacts to fear, extreme temperatures, starvation, thirst, sleep deprivation, and immersion in freezing water, all tools of the torturer's trade. These stressors create problems for memory, mood, and thinking, and sufferers predictably produce information that is deeply unreliable—and, for intelligence purposes, even counterproductive. As O'Mara guides us through the neuroscience of suffering, he reveals the brain to be much more complex than the brute calculations of torturers have allowed, and he points the way to a humane approach to interrogation, founded in the science of brain and behavior.

Torture may be effective in forcing confessions, as in Stalin's Russia. But if we want information that we can depend on to save lives, O'Mara writes, our model should be Napoleon: "It has always been recognized that this way of interrogating men, by putting them to torture, produces nothing worthwhile."

1

Torture in Modern Times

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Worried politician:	I know that these guys know something that they don’t want us to know.
Evidence-based investigator:	How do you know?
Worried politician:	I just know. Now how do I squeeze it out of them? You know, within the law?
A lawyer:	I know a way …

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This book is focused on a terrible reality: the use and persistence of torture and, in particular, its disastrous effects on the brains of its victims. Torture has been with us for all of recorded history. Until recently, though, we thought that liberal democracies were leaving it behind. The “war on terror” and the subsequent release by U.S. president Barack Obama of the so-called Torture Memos in 2009 have made it clear that torture is still very much with us. These memos fueled a major international controversy on the use of torture as a tactic or method in the war against terrorism. The controversy was fueled further by a variety of leaks, memoirs, newspaper and Internet accounts and blogs, books, and major reports by, among others, the International Committee of the Red Cross, the Constitution Project, and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Here, I examine the contemporary use of torture specifically as a method for extracting information from captives. I examine the effect that torture has on the fabric of the brain and on the retrieval of memories that are its supposed focus—after all, if torture is the attempt to force information from the unwilling, it is the attempt to force information retrieval from the memory systems of the brains of the unwilling. A fundamental argument presented here is that the motivation for the use of torture to force information from the memories of the unwilling comes from culturally shared, introspectively derived, and empirically ungrounded psychological and neurobiological beliefs that are fundamentally and demonstrably untrue. This logic for the use of torture—that torture can (and should) be used to motivate captives to reveal information intentionally withheld under normal interrogation—is examined in depth here. Such information is, by definition, stored in the memory systems of the brains of captives. One argument presented at length here is that the effects of torture are, contrary to the beliefs of its proponents, quite the reverse of those intended. Torture is a profound and extreme stressor that causes widespread and enduring alterations to the very fabric of the brain—including in the connections between brain cells (synapses) on which memory depends. Unsurprisingly, therefore, torture also causes many psychopathological changes in the person who is tortured; more surprisingly, it is likely to cause not dissimilar changes in the torturer.

This book is quite deliberately not about the long and difficult fight to extirpate torture as a legally, politically, and culturally sanctioned practice. The international legal position on torture is clear, precise, and nonnegotiable in its definition and in its implications. Torture is immoral and illegal, and signatories to the United Nations Conventions must not engage in, condone, commission, or facilitate torture. Instead, I develop two related issues: why laypeople, policy-makers, and others believe the imposition of “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, … intentionally inflicted on a person” (torture) is a reasonable interrogatory technique, and what we know about the effects of the imposition of such “severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental,” on the brain systems supporting memory, mood, and other functions. This book is written from the perspective of an experimental neuroscientist and discusses torture in the light of what we know about its effects on the brain. I offer one caveat at the outset: torture itself is not a neuroscience concept per se. Instead, I use the concepts of stress, stressors, pain, anxiety, and the like as these are reasonably well defined and map reasonably well onto the methods used in torture and what are sometimes tendentiously and casuistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

There is a vast legal, political, historical, moral, and ethical literature on torture. The analysis presented here differs from many others in an important respect: it is consequentialist and addresses the utilitarian use of and arguments for torture directly on their own terms. The analyses presented here are therefore not a priori deontological (I note that the moral and philosophical arguments for and against torture tend to fall into this category of analysis). I agree with the moral, ethical, and legal case against torture, but I believe it is important not simply to focus on the prior rights and wrongs of its use: it is vital to analyze the logic, methods, and outcomes of this logic of the uses of torture on its own terms. This last point is critical: defenders of torture as a method of extracting information assume that torture works or at least that torture can work, or that torture can be made to work (and, one presumes, “work better” than the nontorture alternatives). Thinking through the evidence base relevant to these assumptions is much more challenging, and it requires that we focus on the logic presented for the use of torture to forcibly access detainees’ long-term memories, as well as on the actual consequences of torture on the integrated neuropsychological functioning of the person who is subjected to it (and, less obviously, on the person who imposes the torture).

Torture by Democracies in Modern Times

Despite the United Nations Convention against Torture (1984), torture still occurs, practiced by a wide variety of state and criminal actors for sadistic, instrumental, and other reasons. It is more pervasive in autocratic countries, but many countries under stress have resorted to torture, including democracies. Arguably, the most extensive campaign of torture conducted in modern times by a Western democracy was that conducted in Algeria by France, during the course of the Franco-Algerian war. Many thousands were subjected to torture, especially in the Casbah, using beatings, electrocution, near-drowning, and stress positions. French actions were hardly unique. During the 1970s, for example, elements of the United Kingdom Military and Security Services resorted to the use of the so-called Five Techniques (starvation/sparse diet; sleep deprivation; hooding; exposure to a continuous white noise; stress positions) in the campaign against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in Northern Ireland. Ian Cobain, in his history of torture in the modern United Kingdom, also notes that “the Five Techniques were always supported by a sixth, unspoken technique: anyone who refused to maintain the stress position would be severely beaten” (2012, 130). And what was the explicit purpose of the Five Techniques? An investigation concluded that “the Five Techniques applied together were designed to put severe mental and physical stress, causing severe suffering, on a person in order to obtain information from him” (ibid., 160; see also Shallice 1972 for an early psychological perspective on the Five Techniques).There are many other such examples of democracies under stress resorting to torture as a shortcut alternative to normal investigative practice (see Rejali 2007). Such outbreaks in the use of torture have been the subject of many detailed accounts by journalists, historians, legal scholars, and even sometimes the torturers themselves. This book is not the place to rehearse this history; as stated, the masterwork in this area is Darius Rejali’s Torture and Democracy (2007), which makes the case that democracies have never entirely given up torture and have indeed pioneered certain methods to avoid public scrutiny, methods that leave no physical marks (so-called white torture). Alberto Gonzales, the former U. S. Attorney General, remarked in a 2015 interview: “When I think about torture it’s broken bones, electric shocks to genitalia. It’s pulling your teeth out with pliers. It’s cutting off a limb. That’s torture. Is waterboarding at the same level? I’d say probably not.” Gonzales is making the all-too-common mistake of consulting the contents of his consciousness to define torture—not statute law, not international treaties, not medical authorities, not the scholarly literature. This leaves us with a problem: when we think of torture, our thinking is deeply colored by images of medieval cruelty: the rending of flesh, the breaking of bones, and pain made visible through scar and scream. We do not think of techniques that leave no visible record of their presence, techniques that manipulate the metabolic and psychopathological extremes of body, brain, and behavior, and which are, by any reasonable standard, torture.

Torture is all too common worldwide, and as mentioned, other democracies have resorted to torture techniques during times of great national stress, when perceived others or out-group members were subjected to extremes during interrogation sessions. The murderous attack by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001, had many enduring consequences, not least on the United States’ treatment and interrogation of prisoners. A covert and overt war was launched against al-Qaeda (and the Taliban). When prisoners were captured, U.S. military and intelligence officials naturally wanted information from them about their networks and any potential or further threats that may exist. How could officials ensure that the prisoners were revealing all they knew during interrogation? Pressure built to make the interrogations tougher. Speculation spread that interrogations were being conducted in new ways (for the United States). Vice President Dick Cheney reinforced the speculation when he revealed that the United States might resort to the “dark side”; he was to describe (in an interview in October, 2006) the decision to employ the waterboard as a “no-brainer.” Similarly, President George W. Bush, in a public acknowledgment that new interrogation procedures had been devised for use on captives, stated, “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations.… I can say the procedures were tough, and they were safe, and lawful, and necessary” (press conference, September 6, 2006).

A substantial debate took place within the U.S. government about how to conduct interrogations to ensure that captives provided all the information contained in their memories to the greatest extent possible. And so the notion of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs—a euphemism for coercive interrogation techniques or torture) was born. EITs were notionally designed to ensure compliance with the questioning of the interrogator and, as a result, to facilitate the release of intentionally withheld information from the memories of captives. Jane Mayer, in her pioneering book The Dark Side, explains the thinking thus: “Scientific research on the efficacy of torture is extremely limited because of the moral and legal impediments to experimentation. Before endorsing physical and psychological abuse, the Bush Administration did no empirical study. The policy seems to have been based on some combination of political preference and intuitive belief about human nature. Yet from the start, top White House officials were utterly convinced that coercion was foolproof. John Yoo, in an informal aside at a book signing in Washington, said unabashedly, ‘It works—we know it does. The CIA says it does and the Vice President says it does’ ” (2008, 119; emphasis added). This is a striking and remarkably credulous assertion from someone who is qualified as a lawyer, working in an evidence-based profession. A declassified report from the Office of the Inspector General (2004) reviewed the internal evidence for the efficacy of these techniques, describing them as a “subjective process” which is “not without some concern” (p. 85); that there were “limited data on which to assess their individual effectiveness” (p. 89). The evidence on the actual efficacy runs to a scant five pages in a more than 250 page report (including supporting appendices). We now know from the report of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (the Torture Report) that an “informal operational assessment” of the program determined that it would not be possible to assess the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques without violating “Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects” regarding human experimentation (SSCI 2014, Findings and Conclusions, Point 16, p. 13). So an empirical study was impossible under law, because the legal standards that must be met to safeguard human participants in empirical research would be breached by such a study—because the human participants could not be safeguarded! The Senate report also confirms that the CIA conducted no “significant research to identify effective interrogation practices, such as conferring with experienced U.S. military or law enforcement interrogators, or with the intelligence, military, or law enforcement services of other countries with experience in counterterrorism and the interrogation of terrorist suspects. Nor are there CIA records referencing any review of the CIA’s past use of coercive interrogation techniques and associated lessons learned” (SSCI 2014, 20).

The empirically and ethically unmoored supportive line of thinking for torture was put bluntly and starkly by Rick Santorum, the former U.S. senator and seeker of the Republican Party’s nomination for the U.S. presidential election of 2012. Santorum, in a comment regarding Senator John McCain’s repudiation of torture, stated, “He doesn’t understand how enhanced interrogation works. I mean, you break somebody, and after they’ve broken they become co-operative” (Summers 2011). (And he said this of someone who had been tortured in Vietnam for five years.) Other nomination-seeking candidates supported his remarks. Statements of this type can be multiplied manifold. The Constitution Project reported, “Jose Rodriguez, head of the CIA’s counterterrorism center from 2002 to 2005, has said, ‘this program was not about hurting anybody. This program was about instilling a sense of hopelessness and despair on the terrorist,’ and hopelessness led detainees to ‘compliance’ ” (2013, 206). Another example: “The CIA, he said, ‘put him in that position to get him to talk. They took it that pain equals cooperation’ ” (Mayer 2008, 256). Similar assertions are dotted through the Torture Memos themselves. You do not need to go far to find people in the popular media arguing similarly. Charles Krauthammer of the Washington Post and a Fox News contributor argued in 2005 that “it would be a gross dereliction of duty for any government not to keep Khalid Sheikh Mohammed isolated, disoriented, alone, despairing, cold and sleepless, in some godforsaken hidden location.” Ironically, Krauthammer is a qualified psychiatrist; were he to actually apply his professional knowledge of psychiatric management, he would, perhaps, come to the view of this book. His argument seems driven more by a desire to punish than to tap into Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s knowledge in a reliable way. There are or have been many others willing to argue along similar grounds (such as the noted legal scholar Alan Dershowitz, 2002): some have renounced their earlier thinking; others have not.

The underlying (psychological) logic of these assumptions is that through a process of “breaking someone” the person will subsequently become compliant and that this, in turn, will loosen his or her tongue. We return to this type of thinking again and again throughout this book. It is not at all clear what “breaking someone” means. Thus, to try to understand what is meant, we need to ask some questions about what will actually be done to the person. Does, for example, coercively enforcing an extended period of sleep deprivation enhance compliance or increase the motivation of the suspect to comply with the instructions of the questioner? The answer (logically) is yes, no, or maybe, depending on the circumstances and the personal characteristics of the sleep-deprived individual. A second necessary question, though, is just as important—does sleep deprivation interact in a positive, negative, or neutral way with the brain systems supporting memory, cognition, and mood? The hope of the interrogator who uses such coercive techniques has to be that the effects will be at worst neutral and at best positive on these brain systems. It should be clear that, when put in these terms, this hope is not obviously the case. In other words, do these techniques actually enhance the outcomes of the interrogation? And how would we ever know that they, in fact, do? The situation becomes even more complicated when you consider what evidence counts as true and false. There is an important distinction between false-positive and false-negative, true-positive and true-negative discovery rates when conducting biomedical and other forms of research. The key bias in thinking about evidence is to focus solely on what are retrospectively thought to be true-positive signals and to disregard the likelihood of false-positive and false-negative discovery rates. In other words, those who are invested in coercion will cherry-pick the data in order to suit the needs of a predetermined narrative which suggests that torture worked and will work again in the future. The signal-to-noise issue arises again and again when considering how to understand what the outcomes of torture are. The Senate Torture Report says, “the interrogation team later deemed the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques a success, not because it resulted in critical threat information, but because it provided further evidence that Abu Zubaydah had not been withholding the aforementioned information from the interrogators” (SSCI 2014, 37). Here, a lack of information provided under coercion is used to prove a negative (something that logicians contend is impossible). If a captive reveals nothing despite the enhanced interrogation techniques, then he must actually know nothing. Of course, the alternative conclusion is that the coercive techniques militate against his revealing anything under coercion: as the old saw has it, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Finally, let us examine the frequent use of the phrase “to break someone” as the object of torture. This is a most remarkable phrase—it rolls off the tongue, it is easy to state, and it sounds like it might actually mean something. But what does “breaking someone” actually mea...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Introduction
• 1. Torture in Modern Times
• 2. How the Brain Supports Memory and Executive Functions
• 3. Can We Use Technology to Detect Deception?
• 4. What Do Stress and Pain Do to the Brain?
• 5. What Does Sleep Deprivation Do to the Brain?
• 6. Drowning, Cooling, Heating, and Starving the Brain
• 7. Why Does a Torturer Torture?
• 8. Why Torture? Why Not Talk?
• References
• Further Reading
• Acknowledgments
• Index