Torture Is Not a Game On the Limitations and Dangers of Rational Choice Methods

John Schiemann's "Interrogational Torture: Or How Good Guys Get Bad Information with Ugly Methods" posits that we can use game theory to determine whether or not torture is an effective way to get information. Schiemann says that game theory is a necessary- perhaps our only-means to obtain "firm conclusions" that meet a "social scientific standard" when it comes to the effectiveness of torture (Schiemann 2012, 3). His model will "substitute for the empirical data we do not- and likely will not ever-have" (Schiemann 2012, 4). In what follows, I show that we know enough about torture to know that conceptualizing it primarily as a strategic interaction between two players is dubious at best and dangerous at worst. Propagating the falsehood that torture is primarily a game obscures the fundamental character of torture and invites policy makers and social scientists to use formal models to improve or perfect torture. However, the article is an exemplar of how rational choice theory as a descriptive understanding of the world undermines the original aims of the normative liberal economic theory from which it sprang. In particular, the article highlights the paradoxes of an excessive commitment to the idea that reasoned choices are the most important feature of any and all human interactions.Torture Is an Attack on the Capacity to ChooseIn justifying his use of formal methods to understand torture, Schiemann quotes eminent torture scholar Darius Rejali as saying that the evidence regarding torture is "fragmentary." However, what Rejali actually says is that the evidence is "too rich and too fragmentary" for particular kinds of conclusions (Rejali 2007, 7). It is not the case that we do not know much about torture or its effectiveness. Accounts of torture come from "so many countries, so many different writers, and in so many styles, guises, and emotional hues (from coldly technical to blatantly cruel, cruelly disingenuous, and literally tortured)" (Rejali 2007, 7) that they are not amenable to large-N data sets. However, Rejali and others who have examined the compendious evidence argue that it does tell us something. In a chapter in Torture and Democracy titled "Does Torture Work?" Rejali concludes that the sources of error in organized torture "are systematic and ineradicable . . . [torture] yields poor information, sweeps up many innocents, degrades organizational capabilities, and destroys interrogators" (Rejali 2007, 478). Torture sometimes works but is unlikely to be effective in the very circumstances when it is most needed, for example, during times of battle or emergency (Rejali 2007, 474- 78). Similarly, Rumney writes that while "it is certainly the case that there are inherent uncertainties in considering the effectiveness of coercive interrogation, it cannot be said that we have 'no idea' as to its reliability" (Rumney 2006, 485). He concludes that "coercion does sometimes work in individual cases, but a significant body of evidence raises serious doubts about its overall reliability and predictability" (Rumney 2006, 485, 512).1 We do not need a formal model to know that torture is a generally ineffective way of gathering intelligence.We also know that the reasons for torture's ineffectiveness stem from the fact that it is different from other forms of coercion. Consider some of the techniques used against detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba (techniques that have been called "torture light" to indicate that they are relatively low on the scale of human horrors). Citing sources familiar with the report of the International Committee of the Red Cross, Jane Mayer recounts that prisoners were locked in confined spaces that did not allow them to stand or stretch out for hours on end, kept on their tiptoes with their arms extended up over their heads for eight-hour stretches every day for two or three months, kept awake for as long as ninety-six hours, bombarded with bright lights and eardrum-shattering sounds for twenty-four hours a day for weeks on end, kept completely naked in cold water and frigid temperatures for a month, slammed against walls blindfolded with the use of a dog leash, sexually humiliated, and, of course, infamously, exposed to repeated simulated drowning (Mayer 2008, 165-69). …