CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background to the Study

Governments have at times described torture as an indispensable tool for gathering strategic intelligence from detainees. The social scientific research that bears on this claim covers three areas: the effectiveness of coercive interrogation, its impact on the people involved, and the conditions that cause it. The first area includes research on false confessions and its relevance to interrogations in which pain is inflicted. The second covers the mental health consequences of torture for survivors and perpetrators. The third concerns the social-psychological conditions that make acts of cruelty possible, such as those exposed at Abu Ghraib, and the arguments commonly offered to justify torture. Costanzo and Gerrity (2009) argue that any supposed benefit of torture has to be weighed against its demonstrated costs. These include the unreliable information it yields, the mental and emotional toll on victims and torturers alike, the damage to a state's international standing and credibility, and the risk of retaliation against soldiers and civilians.

Torture is one of the most extreme forms of human violence, and it leaves both physical and psychological harm. It has been practised for thousands of years and is still found in many parts of the world. Research indicates that torture can have lasting negative effects on survivors and perpetrators, and that it is an unreliable way of obtaining accurate information in interrogation (Costanzo & Gerrity, 2009; Vrij et al., 2017). International law prohibits it in absolute terms, yet its use continues in internal conflicts within states and in conflicts between them, and the 2022 revision of the Istanbul Protocol, the United Nations manual on investigating and documenting torture, was issued precisely to strengthen the tools available for preventing it and assisting survivors (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], 2022).

The debate over interrogation practices has been especially intense in the United States. In 2003 the world saw photographs of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, taken by American soldiers with ordinary cameras and mobile phones. The images showed detainees exposed to cruel and humiliating treatment, including intimidation by dogs, forced nakedness, hooding, and restraint in painful positions, while some of the soldiers posed alongside their victims and appeared to enjoy the abuse. In explaining the images, soldiers said they had been told to "soften up" prisoners ahead of more formal questioning (Costanzo & Gerrity, 2009). The scandal drew scholarly attention to the way coercive interrogation methods, once adopted, can slide towards outright torture (Vrij et al., 2017).

The episode occurred within what the United States called the "Global War on Terror", in which many prisoners were taken by the United States and its allies. Some of them may hold information that could prevent or reduce the impact of attacks on civilians, prevent attacks on military targets, help dismantle terrorist networks, or disrupt their command and control. Comparable situations arise elsewhere, for example where a recognised government is in conflict with armed groups. The US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (2014) examined the Central Intelligence Agency's detention and interrogation programme after 2001 and concluded that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" it used were not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or securing the cooperation of detainees.

Governments and occupying powers stand in an asymmetric relationship to the groups they fight. Their decisions are taken unilaterally, and humane treatment of detainees will not necessarily be matched by humane treatment from the other side. This study does not examine whether the detention of prisoners is justified. It is concerned with how interrogation sessions are conducted and with whether torture in those sessions can ever be justified as a means of obtaining reliable information.

The question is not confined to wartime. In Nigeria, Amnesty International (2014) found that torture and other ill-treatment were routine in criminal investigations, with suspects in police and military custody tortured to punish them or to extract "confessions" as a shortcut to solving cases, particularly armed robbery and murder. Nigeria criminalised torture through the Anti-Torture Act of 2017, which prescribes a minimum penalty of 25 years' imprisonment (Odinkalu, 2022). Even so, Amnesty International (2020) documented at least 82 cases of torture, ill-treatment and extrajudicial execution by the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) between January 2017 and May 2020 and reported that no SARS officer had been held accountable for the violations it documented. The reliability of information obtained from crime suspects under such conditions is therefore a pressing practical and legal concern.

1.1.1 Definitions

Dictionary definitions. To interrogate is to question formally and systematically. Torture, as a noun, is the infliction of intense pain, for example by burning, crushing or wounding, in order to punish, coerce or give sadistic pleasure; as a verb, it means to cause intense suffering to someone, or to punish or coerce by inflicting excruciating pain (Merriam-Webster, n.d.).

Legal definitions. Section 2340 of Title 18 of the United States Code (the US Anti-Torture Act) provides:

(1) "torture" means an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control;

(2) "severe mental pain or suffering" means the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from (A) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (B) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (C) the threat of imminent death; or (D) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind-altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality (18 U.S.C. § 2340).

Article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment states that, for the purposes of the Convention, "torture" means any act by which severe pain or 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 person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions (United Nations General Assembly, 1984).

The dictionary definition of interrogation conveys little of the fact that the people being questioned usually do not want to give up what they know. Interrogators therefore often turn to coercive techniques to make the subject yield the information they want. These techniques lie on a continuum that runs from direct questioning through to torture and, at the extreme, death (Vrij et al., 2017).

1.2 Statement of the Problem

The unreliability of information obtained under torture has been recognised for a very long time. As early as the third century, the Roman jurist Ulpian warned that such information should not be trusted because some people are so sensitive to pain that they will tell any lie rather than endure it (Costanzo & Gerrity, 2009). The same warning has been repeated down the centuries. A CIA operative who took part in torture during the Vietnam War is reported to have said that there were people willing to confess to anything if the torture would only stop (Costanzo & Gerrity, 2009). Modern research points the same way. Psychological studies show that harsh interrogation tends to increase a subject's resistance instead of cooperation, that its threatening and adversarial character interferes with the retrieval of information from memory and so reduces how extensive, detailed and accurate the subject's account is, and that it makes lie detection harder (Vrij et al., 2017).

It must be acknowledged that torture may sometimes lead to the disclosure of accurate information, because some people who face excruciating pain do reveal what they know. However, survivors of torture commonly report that the true information they gave was deliberately incomplete or mixed with falsehood, because the aim was to appease the torturer rather than to tell the truth (Costanzo & Gerrity, 2009). Interrogators are not all-knowing and cannot tell which parts of a statement are true and which are false. Misreading their victims, torturers may fail to recognise the truth and continue to inflict pain, and victims in turn may keep talking and invent information in an effort to make it stop. Even where torture appears to have preceded the disclosure of useful information, it is impossible to know whether less coercive forms of interrogation would have produced the same or better results. There is in fact growing evidence that rapport-based information-gathering approaches promote cooperation, improve recall of relevant and reliable information, and make it easier to judge credibility (Vrij et al., 2017).

In criminal investigations the problem has a further dimension. Where confessions are extracted by torture, the police may rely on them alone instead of conducting a proper investigation. Amnesty International (2014) reports that although international and Nigerian law forbid the use in court of confessions obtained through torture, lawyers told its researchers that police in most cases depend solely on confessional statements. Even when such a confession is eventually struck out and the prosecution collapses, the suspect may already have spent months or years in detention awaiting or undergoing trial. A method that produces unreliable statements, convicts the wrong people and leaves the real offenders at large defeats the purpose of interrogation.

1.3 Aim of the Study

The main aim of this study is to evaluate torture as a means of obtaining reliable information from crime suspects.

1.3.1 Objectives of the Study

The specific objectives are to:

1. examine the research on coercive interrogation and false confessions and its relevance to interrogations that involve torture;
2. assess the reliability of information obtained from crime suspects through torture compared with non-coercive methods;
3. review the psychological and mental health consequences of torture for survivors and perpetrators; and
4. explore the social-psychological conditions that promote cruelty in interrogation and the arguments commonly used to justify torture.

1.3.2 Research Questions

1. How reliable is information obtained from crime suspects through torture?
2. What does research on coercive interrogation and false confessions reveal about torture-based interrogation?
3. What are the psychological and mental health consequences of torture for survivors and perpetrators?
4. What conditions encourage acts of cruelty during interrogation, and how are they justified?

1.4 Significance of the Study

Since the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001, the national and international debate over the use of torture in interrogation has concentrated on legal and moral questions. The psychology of torture, and the substantial body of empirical research relevant to the debate, are often overlooked (Costanzo & Gerrity, 2009). This study draws that research together and places the issue of torture in its social-psychological context. It begins with research on the psychology of coercive interrogation and the problem of false confessions. It then summarises findings on the psychological impact of torture on victims and perpetrators. Finally, it places torture in context by examining the situational factors that facilitate cruelty and the arguments governments and individuals use to justify it.

The study will also benefit law enforcement agencies, policy makers and legal practitioners who must decide how suspects are to be questioned, as well as researchers and academics carrying out work related to this study.

References

Amnesty International. (2014). Welcome to hell fire: Torture and other ill-treatment in Nigeria. London: Amnesty International. https://www.amnestyusa.org/research/reports/welcome-to-hell-fire-torture-and-other-ill-treatment-in-nigeria

Amnesty International. (2020). Nigeria: Time to end impunity: Torture and other violations by Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS). London: Amnesty International. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2020/06/nigeria-horrific-reign-of-impunity-by-sars-makes-mockery-of-anti-torture-law/

Costanzo, M. A., & Gerrity, E. (2009). The effects and effectiveness of using torture as an interrogation device: Using research to inform the policy debate. Social Issues and Policy Review, 3(1), 179–210. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1751-2409.2009.01014.x

Merriam-Webster. (n.d.). Interrogate; Torture. In Merriam-Webster.com dictionary. https://www.merriam-webster.com

Odinkalu, C. A. (2022, June 27). When the state condones torture. ThisDay. https://www.thisdaylive.com/2022/06/27/when-the-state-condones-torture/

Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. (2022). Istanbul Protocol: Manual on the effective investigation and documentation of torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (Rev. 2). New York and Geneva: United Nations.

United Nations General Assembly. (1984). Convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/convention-against-torture-and-other-cruel-inhuman-or-degrading

United States Code. Title 18, § 2340: Definitions (Torture).

United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. (2014). Committee study of the Central Intelligence Agency's detention and interrogation program. Washington, DC: U.S. Senate.

Vrij, A., Meissner, C. A., Fisher, R. P., Kassin, S. M., Morgan, C. A., III, & Kleinman, S. M. (2017). Psychological perspectives on interrogation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 12(6), 927–955. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691617706515