“The scientific community has never established that coercive interrogation methods are an effective means of obtaining reliable intelligence information.” That conclusion came from a 2006 report on torture by the Intelligence Science Board, which provides scientific advice to the American intelligence services. Was their advice listened to? Well open a newspaper and take a guess.

How did we get here? Let’s start at the beginning. It’s hard to talk about torture without mentioning Jesus. The western world is dominated by a belief system in which a Middle Eastern rebel was tortured by public officials acting on behalf of the world’s biggest superpower, under the logic that it would somehow save the world. Switch God, Rome and Jesus for the CIA, Washington and some orange-suited terror suspects and you have a fairground mirror image of the same collection of tropes.

I’m not trying to compare Khalid Sheikh Mohammed with Jesus because I’m not stupid. Still, it’s difficult to believe there’s not some twisted narrative thread that can be traced through the centuries of memetic evolution between the gospels and 24. We carry within us a set of beliefs and opinions about torture that have been stained into the fabric of our culture over millennia.

That makes arguments against torture an uphill struggle. It’s hard to be unbiased when you’ve grown up watching nine hundred episodes of Jack Bauer shooting, beating or electrifying the tits off suspects in order to save the world. The idea that torture always works is so prevalent in popular fiction that there’s even a named trope for it, “Torture Always Works.” In TV land, to quote the editors at TV Tropes:

[Torture] works as an instant source of 100% reliable information. The information extracted under torture is always accurate and important, even if the interrogator himself starts with no information at all and so has no way to know if the prisoner is telling the truth or lying. The possibility of having the wrong person, who will say anything under torture whether they know anything or not, will be excluded.

Then there’s brute pragmatism. The moral maths. One life is worth less than many lives, so if one kneecap has to be shattered to prevent a bomb going off or a David Hasselhoff comeback tour then perhaps it’s a price worth paying. The classic form of this argument is known as the “Ticking Time Bomb Scenario”, but it’s not hard to concoct any number of implausible scenarios in which a large majority would be happy to call for the chap with the electrodes. We all have a limit, whatever moralising guff we like to tell people on Twitter.

For whatever reason, torture has a level of support in America that most politicians can only dream of. JFK would have been happy to swap approval ratings. Only 22% of people in a YouGov poll last April were completely opposed to the use of torture, and support generally trended upwards through the Bush years and beyond. The philosophical argument against torture was lost sometime in the Old Testament, and there’s no sign of things turning around any time soon.

Luckily there’s another good argument, as I set out in these pages back in 2010 – torture simply doesn’t work. No compelling evidence has ever been put forward to show that torture can produce reliable intelligence. Worse still, the techniques used – typically causing stress, pain, sleep deprivation, or confusion – are textbook examples of ways to screw up a person’s recollection.

The intelligence and military communities have long accepted this to be true. The Intelligence Science Board provided scientific guidance to the US intelligence community on this matter, which I quoted at the top of this article. It was evidently ignored. In my 2010 article I quoted the US Army’s Training Manual, which states:

The use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.

The US Senate’s report on the CIA’s use of torture therefore tells us little we didn’t already know. Using the agency’s own records it found that torture “was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining cooperation.” In fact the CIA itself had reached the same conclusion more than a decade before, as the report pointedly notes:

… prior to the attacks of September 2001, the CIA itself determined from its own experience with coercive interrogations, that such techniques ‘do not produce intelligence,’ ‘will probably result in false answers,’ and had historically proven to be ineffective.

How did the CIA degenerate from that position into its current predicament? It’s difficult to tell from the brief glimpses revealed by the Senators’ executive summary, but part of the problem seems to be that the CIA found its own dubious experts, and built a research community that was basically divorced from reality.

The British Psychological Society put out an interesting but little-noticed response to the Senate report, stating: “we note with deep regret that some members of the profession and discipline of psychology were involved in developing some of these techniques.” That involvement took the form of contracts worth a staggering $180m, awarded to a company run by two psychologists who appear to have been little more than quacks. The report notes that neither, “had any experience as an interrogator, nor did either have specialized knowledge of al-Qaida, a background in counterterrorism, or any relevant cultural or linguistic expertise.”

In spite of these shortcomings, the intrepid doctors were able to develop presumably unpublished “theories of interrogation based on ‘learned helplessness’” (a kind of passive state associated with depression and loss of control) along with “the list of enhanced interrogation techniques that was approved for use against Abu Zubaydah and subsequent CIA detainees.”



It’s not clear from the report who exactly was involved, but Salon published an article in 2009 exploring some of the early stages of this work. “Learned helplessness” was a concept developed by the famed psychologist Marty Seligman, who himself has earned tens of millions in defence contracts since 9/11. Vaughan Bell published a good article on the CIA’s use of the concept a few years ago, but suffice it to say that there’s no great reason to believe inducing the state aids interrogations.

These guys weren’t just back-room theorists though. “The psychologists personally conducted interrogations of some of the CIA’s most significant detainees using these techniques.” On page 487 of the report, we learn that a psychologist told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, “if anything happens in the United States, we’re going to kill your children,” bringing a whole new meaning to “daddy issues”.

In a stunningly obtuse piece of mismanagement, the same psychologists the CIA had contracted to engage in the torture were also assessing their own effectiveness, as detailed on page 473:

The CIA Inspector General Special Review states that CIA ‘psychologists objected to the use of on-site psychologists as interrogators and raised conflict of interest and ethical concerns.’ According to the Special Review, this was ‘based on a concern that the on-site psychologists who were administering the [CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques] participated in the evaluations, assessing the effectiveness and impact of the [CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques] on the detainees. In January 2003, CIA Headquarters requested that at least one other psychologist be present who was not physically participating in the administration of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques. According to [Redacted] OMS, however, the problem still existed because ‘psychologist/interrogators continue to perform both functions.’

The situation being described would be insane even if you took torture out of the picture – the CIA was apparently contracting work out to a private company, then asking that company to evaluate its own performance. You might as well ask students to grade their own exams. And someone who just tortured a suspect is hardly going to write a report the next day concluding, “oh wait, actually, I probably didn’t need to do that. YOLO!” From the moment this “scientific” programme was set up, it was destined to degenerate into a cycle of torture, post-hoc justification, and more torture.

That’s not to say that it was necessarily intentional. It’s tempting to view CIA operatives as evil sadists, but I doubt that’s the case. I suspect the situation was more like a group of homeopaths – a community of believers building their own insular bubble, convinced that a “treatment” works, and living in a state of defensive denial. The evidence was there, but they simply couldn’t see it. The deeper they fell down the rabbit hole, the more resistant they became to correction or criticism.

In that sense, this whole affair is no different from a thousand other instances of bad science. It should be a powerful reminder of what happens when groups of politicians or civil servant isolate themselves from scientific evidence and dissenting opinion, whether on climate change, drug policy, or torture. The civil servants and politicians caught up in this should be ashamed. The psychologists involved should have no place in the scientific community.