Does interrogational torture work? What do we mean by “work”? How good does the information have to be for torture to “work”? How often must it provide good information to be considered effective? What is the price of this degree of effectiveness? How frequently must torture be used to achieve it? How harsh must the torture be? Will innocent detainees be tortured or only guilty ones?
My goal in this book is to answer these questions. Doing so is vital.
The Bush administration employed interrogational torture because it assumed that it works. Many Americans think it works and can be justified in some circumstances. And if there were another terrorist attack on the United States, such calls would only increase. But if these people are wrong, then we should not torture. We fail to get the information we need, and this is bad in a war against terrorists. Moreover, it means we are engaging in pure sadism. Being tough and pragmatic in defense of the country is American; being sadistic is not very patriotic. Even most people who favor using torture would agree not to use it if they thought it did not work. What is more, we actually make the United States even worse off by spoon-feeding recruitment propaganda to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Bad information and more terrorists mean that more Americans die. On 9/11 I saw the smoke from the World Trade Center from the building where I teach in New Jersey; I understand the impulse to revenge. Revenge may be sweet, but is it worth more innocent lives?
It may be that we would reject interrogational torture even if it did work, as un-American or on other moral grounds. In other words, demonstrating that interrogational torture is effective may not be a sufficient condition to justify its use, but it is surely a necessary condition: If it does not work, then it cannot be justified as an interrogation technique.
Although the questions I raise are old if unsettled ones, the approach I take to answer them is unorthodox. I analyze interrogational torture using a mathematical modeling technique called game theory, though this book contains almost none of the math.1 Game theory is a type of applied mathematics used to figure out what people (should) do in strategic situations, when what choice you want to make depends on what your opponent does (and vice versa) and what you get in the end depends on everyone’s choices—not just yours (true for your opponent too). Detainees and interrogators are in exactly this sort of game, and this makes game theory an applicable, useful, and powerful way of examining it. Another nice thing about game theory is that it sometimes generates some surprising and counterintuitive results. This book is one of those times. I am going to challenge not just conventional wisdom, but also your own intuitions and even basic instincts about torture and interrogations.
There are many decent and reasonable people who do not like the idea of torture but think it is necessary to protect America and Americans from terrorism. If this describes you, then I hope I can convince you that it is worth examining through reason and logic the assumption that torture works. If you are someone who already opposes torture, I hope I am able to convince you why it is necessary not to treat proponents as “moral monsters” but instead to examine the effectiveness claims of torture proponents. Either way, I hope you will agree that this is a question important enough to take seriously and pursue seriously. Torture is no game.
John W. Schiemann
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The idea for this book began with an observation in a paper by Roger Koppl. That paper prompted me to write a journal article published in March 2012 (Schiemann 2012a). In the course of writing that article, I benefited greatly not only from conversations with Roger, but also discussions with Ken Benoit, Bruce Peabody, and Tobias Å kerlund. Ken kindly invited me to Trinity College, Dublin to present a draft of the paper. Andrew Healy, Roger Koppl, Darius Rejali, David Smailes, Georg Vanberg, Ken Benoit, Rene Lindstädt, Bruce Peabody, Matthew Alexander, and several anonymous reviewers for Political Research Quarterly offered many useful suggestions which found their way into not just the article, but also into the book. Marek Slaby generously provided help with some of the formal mathematical work in the paper, for which I’m also grateful. In addition to Tobias, Pierce O’Reilly, Dinah Y. Olaniyan, Michael Carr, Devon Douglas Bowers, and Kyle Morgan also provided excellent research assistance.
The idea for this book began, as many good ideas tend to do, over good Kentucky bourbon. My wife Carol Rounds, her brother Steve Rounds, and I have a tradition of discussing a book over bourbon when he is in town. While I was still working on the paper, Carol suggested taking my work on torture to a wider audience. This book is a result of their encouragement and support; so if, after reading through to the end, you decide that “it could have been a pamphlet,” you can blame them.
I incurred additional debts while writing the book. Tori Rosen, Ivana Širović, and Jason Aplon’s reading of initial drafts of the early chapters helped me write better for a non-academic audience, as did students in several classes. Abagail Eckert graciously double-checked the references, for which I am grateful. My friend, departmental colleague, and office neighbor Bruce Peabody provided his habitual perspicacious commentary on selections from the manuscript, as did Steve Rounds. Marek Slaby again helped me clean up the mathematical notation. Three anonymous reviewers for Oxford University Press offered helpful suggestions, especially on the need to strike the right tone. The reader will decide whether I succeeded or not in that regard. With respect to OUP, I am also grateful to my editor, Angela Chnapko, for her enthusiastic support of the project from my very first contact with her and her careful reading and suggestions for the full manuscript. I am additionally indebted to the LaTeX community for posting code online I could freely steal. Chip Carey kindly invited me to participate in a Symposium on Torture in the Americas at Georgia State University in March 2015. The discussions I had there were very helpful. As always, my terrific colleagues in the Department of Social Sciences and History provided the (usually dark) humor and perspective necessary while writing a book. I am grateful to Peter Woolley for his invitation to speak at the Politics on the PublicMind lecture series as well as to Geoff Weinman for financial support from Becton College over the course of the project.
I would like to thank separately Scott Gartner, Scott Gates, Carol Rounds, and my old friend and colleague Ken Benoit, all of whom read the entire manuscript and improved it with their comments. Livio Di Lonardo painstakingly worked through all the formal material and offered very useful suggestions to clarify the argument in many places. I am grateful for his close reading. Carol and Ken read with such incredible care and detail that I am tempted to blame them for any remaining errors. (But I won’t.)
Finally, I am grateful to the love of my life, Carol, and our wonderful daughter Em for providing not only encouragement, but also much-needed balance during this project. I promise I’ll give the ps, qs, and boxes a rest for a while.
John W. Schiemann