Anatomy of Torture

Ron E. Hassner

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781501762048
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Does torture "work?" Can controversial techniques such as waterboarding extract crucial and reliable intelligence? Since 9/11, this question has been angrily debated in the halls of power and the court of public opinion. In Anatomy of Torture, Ron E. Hassner mines the archives of the Spanish Inquisition to propose an answer that will frustrate and infuriate both sides of the divide.The Inquisition's scribes recorded every torment, every scream, and every confession in the torture chamber. Their transcripts reveal that Inquisitors used torture deliberately and meticulously, unlike the rash, improvised methods used by the United States after 9/11. In their relentless pursuit of underground Jewish communities in Spain and Mexico, the Inquisition tortured in cold blood. But they treated any information extracted with caution: torture was used to test information provided through other means, not to uncover startling new evidence.

Hassner's findings in Anatomy of Torture have important implications for ongoing torture debates. Rather than insist that torture is ineffective, torture critics should focus their attention on the morality of torture. If torture is evil, its efficacy is irrelevant. At the same time, torture defenders cannot advocate for torture as a counterterrorist "quick fix": torture has never located, nor will ever locate, the hypothetical "ticking bomb" that is frequently invoked to justify brutality in the name of security.

1

How Little We Know about Torture

Does torture “work”? My answer will frustrate some readers and infuriate others. Those who believe that torture “doesn’t work” will read that torture has, at times, forced victims to divulge crucial and truthful information that they would not otherwise have revealed. On the other hand, those readers who regard torture to be a quick and effective, if cruel, tool for addressing “ticking bomb” threats will learn that torture is slow and tends to provide fragmentary information even under optimal conditions. It also exacts a tremendous social, political, and moral cost. Bluntly put, torture “works” but not the way you think it does.

It is impossible to assess the nature of modern torture. We know too little about contemporary cases, in the United States or elsewhere. Most of the information on recent US torture is classified and is likely to remain inaccessible for decades to come. Evidence from twentieth-century cases is equally sparse. Governments that have engaged in torture have not released comprehensive data that would permit a thorough analysis. Witness accounts are no less problematic. Victims and perpetrators alike are loath to share their experiences. Social science research on confrontational interrogation methods relies on analyses of police interrogations or on laboratory experiments, neither of which involve torture.

There exists, however, an underutilized historical source that can shed significant light on the nature of torture. That source is the archives of the Spanish Inquisition. This book is the first to wield extensive data from the Inquisition in order to conduct a dispassionate empirical analysis of torture, its causes, characteristics, and effects. I analyze scores of manuscripts, drawn from key periods in the history of the Spanish Inquisition, to provide an anatomy of torture. To analyze these findings, I bring together two research programs that have not been in conversation with one another: the historiography of the Spanish Inquisition and the study of contemporary interrogational torture. I analyze the intersection of these two literatures by means of a third field of inquiry, the scholarship on intelligence analysis, to explore how the Inquisition assessed information extracted by coercive and noncoercive means and to explain why it adopted the torture practices that it came to adopt.

This book does not purport to provide the anatomy of torture. Five-hundred-year-old evidence can only teach us so much about current torture practices. This is an anatomy of torture. It is a study of how torture has been employed in the past, in a specific period and under particular circumstances. Those circumstances are extreme: the Inquisition’s target population was confined within the realms of an authoritarian state in which the Inquisition wielded absolute power and could draw on near-unlimited resources. The most important of these resources was time. The Inquisition suffered none of the pressures of a combat setting or an antiterrorism campaign. It could afford to spend decades and centuries perfecting its methods, and it could afford to dedicate years to gathering evidence against its prisoners. Thus the specific anatomy of torture presented here functions as an a fortiori argument. It showcases the strengths and weaknesses of torture under the most permissive conditions, which are unlikely to be met during future interrogation efforts in the United States or other democracies.

How best to define torture has become a matter of some contention in the context of the US counterterrorism effort post-9/11. The United Nations Convention against Torture defines torture broadly to include “any act by which severe pain and suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third party.”¹ In contrast, US advocates of “enhanced interrogation” have conceived of torture more narrowly to include only physical pain that is equivalent in intensity to serious physical injury, such as organ failure or death. They have argued that US coercive interrogation practices fall short of constituting torture.²

No such ambiguity clouds the Inquisition’s definition of torture. As I elucidate in the next chapter, inquisitorial handbooks defined torture very clearly. It consisted of only three forms of physical coercion, applied only in the torture chamber, under strictly delimited circumstances. The Inquisition did not regard harsh confinement prior to interrogation, or the threat of torture, to be torture, nor did it regard painful sentences executed after the end of a trial, such as lashes or hard labor, to be part of that torture.

Institutions have employed torture to punish, hurt, and terrorize. My focus in this book is exclusively on interrogational torture, torture designed to extract information. Interrogational torture is analytically distinct from confessional torture, torture designed to elicit particular statements. In reality, these categories overlap, and they overlap with other forms of torture, such as torture designed to intimidate, or control a population. Often, torturers will purport to torture for one purpose while introducing other goals, intentionally or accidentally.

I divide interrogational torture into two types: exploratory torture and corroborative torture. Exploratory torture is interrogational torture that occurs early in an investigation in order to reveal novel information. As I show, this type of interrogational torture rarely yielded information that the Inquisition found significant or reliable. In the absence of parallel sources of information, detainees subjected to exploratory torture were able to provide false information, hide true information, or pretend not to know much. Indeed, given how sparse information can be at the outset of an investigation, the Inquisition often subjected detainees to exploratory torture even though they had no relevant information to share. Exploratory torture fails because it risks interrogating the wrong individuals and because it fails to uncover the right information. A second type of interrogational torture, corroborative torture, occurs toward the end of an investigation. It is used to confirm or reject prior information, not to generate new discoveries. At times, this type of interrogational torture provided the Inquisition with truthful, and useful, information. Nonetheless, the Inquisition treated its results with suspicion, as one questionable source among many in its investigations.

The next chapter will demonstrate that the primary goal of inquisitorial torture was interrogational, and not confessional as is often falsely believed. The Inquisition was not interested in unfalsifiable claims about belief, and it did not demand, let alone believe, confessions of faith. The “confessions” that the Inquisition sought were falsifiable statements of fact about heretical practices, not heretical ideas or sentiments. The Inquisition corroborated these testimonies by contrasting them with parallel sources of evidence, as any intelligence-gathering organization would. In that sense, its stated goals were not much different than the purported goals of contemporary intelligence agencies. And since the stated goal of inquisitorial torture was interrogatory, that is also the standard against which I evaluate its results. Did its suspects reveal accurate information that the Inquisition considered useful, as a result of torture, that they would not have revealed in the absence of torture?

Drawing on hundreds of cases of inquisitorial torture, I show that interrogational torture did provide the Inquisition with reliable information under very restricted conditions. Like all sources of intelligence, interrogational torture misguided and mislead much of the time. But it also yielded accurate and actionable intelligence, especially once the Inquisition developed sophisticated tools to discern truth from lies. Its tribunals used information on heretical practices, some of which was extracted by means of violence or threat of violence, to eradicate entire communities of Jews, Muslims, and non-Catholic Christians.

I also demonstrate that interrogational torture was an imperfect source of information. Unlike many of their modern counterparts, inquisitors did not regard torture as easy, quick, or cheap. Despite the immense resources and freedoms at their disposal, they treated torture cautiously, even suspiciously. Inquisitors tortured as a last resort in order to corroborate existing information, not in order to uncover new leads. They never relied exclusively on information gleaned from torture to condemn the accused.

Both of these findings have important implications for ongoing torture debates. Torture critics are unwise to base their condemnations on efficacy grounds, for two reasons, one stronger than the other. For one, torture has occasionally proven effective at extracting relevant information. This is an unfortunate reality, but it is also a fact. More important, the efficacy of torture has no bearing on morality. Critics should judge the morality of torture on moral grounds. If torture is evil, its efficacy is irrelevant.

At the same time, torture defenders are misguided in advocating for torture as a counterterrorism “silver bullet.” Torture is least effective where torture proponents advocate its use most enthusiastically: when responses to urgent crises call for novel and comprehensive information. In actuality, torture proceeds in small and modest steps. Analyzing intelligence extracted by means of torture requires corroboration, and corroboration takes time. Because corroboration is crucial, intelligence analysts will always distrust information that was provided by one source at one particular moment in time compared to intelligence gradually culled from multiple independent sources. No torture has, or will ever, defuse a “ticking bomb.”

The Problem of Feeble Evidence

No form of torture has come to symbolize American torture policy more than waterboarding. But what, exactly, is waterboarding? Does it involve drowning or just the perception of drowning? Does water enter the detainee’s lungs, posing a threat to life? As practiced in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos, or in Algeria under French occupation, waterboarding involved pouring water down a detainee’s throat until he was “filled … up with water.”³ In contrast, as practiced on US troops during Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training, waterboarding involved water on the face only, to “mimic” drowning.⁴ Which of these variants did the CIA practice in the aftermath of September 11, 2001? Outside the CIA, nobody seems to know the answer.

Some propose that it creates the mere illusion of drowning. According to a Senate report on the treatment of detainees in US custody, waterboarding is “the use of a wet towel and dripping water to induce the misperception of drowning.”⁵ CIA officials offered a different description to ABC News: “Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner’s face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.”⁶ An August 2002 memorandum by the Department of Justice described the procedure as involving a saturated cloth: “Once the cloth is saturated and completely covers the mouth and nose, air flow is slightly restricted for 20 to 40 seconds due to the presence of the cloth.”⁷ Jose Rodriguez, former director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, claims that waterboarding involves neither drowning nor asphyxiation. Rather, it creates “the sensation of being on the verge of drowning.”⁸ Mark Fallon, director of the Criminal Investigative Task Force in Guantánamo confirms: Waterboarding “can feel like you’re drowning … as if you’re suffocating.”⁹

Others have proposed that waterboarding drowns detainees outright. The New York Times cited an administration memorandum that authorized the CIA to use full-body dunking, tying a detainee to a board and pushing him under water “until he nearly drowns.”¹⁰ A Salon.com exposé alleged that CIA interrogators “pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death.”¹¹ A Navy instructor who oversaw hundreds of waterboarding training sessions argued that “it’s not simulated anything. It’s slow-motion suffocation.”¹² Other critics split the difference, proposing that waterboarding manages to somehow both imitate and cause drowning. For example, one historian describes contemporary waterboarding as “pouring water down the victim’s throat to simulate, with terrifying reality, the sensation of drowning.”¹³ He does not explain how the procedure can both simulate suffocation and suffocate at the same time. Summarizing, Darius Rejali characterizes what we know about contemporary waterboarding as “incoherent.”¹⁴

We also do not know how often waterboarding has been employed or with what results. One CIA source claims that Abu Zubaydah (AZ) was waterboarded only once, for thirty to thirty-five seconds. A second CIA source claims that he was waterboarded about five times. AZ told the Red Cross that he was waterboarded at least ten times. But a third CIA report claims that he was waterboarded 83 times.¹⁵ Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) interrogator Ali Soufan claims that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) was waterboarded 183 times, a CIA source claims that he was waterboarded fifteen times, but KSM himself told the Red Cross that he was waterboarded five times.¹⁶ Which of those statements is correct?

The study of interrogational torture has made significant strides in recent years.¹⁷ But the literature on contemporary US torture continues to be riven by bitter disagreements about the causes and effects of torture. At the foundation of these disagreements lie basic uncertainties about facts. Scholars know little about torture in the twentieth century and even less about torture in the aftermath of 9/11. Much of their asse...