Is Torture Effective? It Depends on What You Mean

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When people ask whether torture works, they usually mean “Is torture an effective way to quickly gather vital information?”

The answer is clear: It is not. Torture has repeatedly been found to be an unreliable method of getting accurate information. It’s widely viewed by researchers and intelligence experts as far less effective than other approaches to gathering information, such as developing rapport with the target, followed by various strategic and cognitive interviewing methods. Under conditions of extreme distress, people will say just about anything to stop the terror and the pain, whether physical or psychological. What they seldom do, however, is tell the truth about whatever their torturer is asking. Moreover, the disorganizing and destructive effects of torture on the human brain make accurate recall difficult and increase the likelihood of people providing false information.

In the immediate wake of the September 11 attacks on the United States, FBI interrogators were successfully gathering information from a high-value subject, Abu Zubaydah. As recounted in his brilliant book, Black Banners, FBI interrogator Ali Soufan and his team used rapport building and strategic interviewing to build trust, quickly acquiring vital information about the 9/11 attacks. However, in the critical stage of their work, the CIA arrived, took over the interrogation, and switched immediately to the use of “enhanced interrogation” methods, a misleading term for torture. At that point, Zubaydah shut down and stopped sharing useful information.

Popular Media Images of Torture

If you believe that torture is effective at gathering life-saving information, that’s understandable. That’s certainly the image presented on popular TV shows such as "24" and "Fauda," and in Hollywood films such as "Zero Dark Thirty." With just minutes to go before a bomb explodes in a marketplace or rockets are to be fired into a densely populated city, physical torture is used on a terrorist cell insider to extract a critical bit of information needed to stop the attack. Disaster is averted, and the use of torture, however morally questionable, seems justified, the lesser of two evils. We might not feel good about the brutality, but if it saves lives, maybe, just maybe, it’s a necessary evil, a moral and strategic compromise we can live with.

You could also be forgiven for believing torture is effective if you listen to conservative politicians and right-wing populists talk about it. For example, in 2016, Donald Trump insisted that the United States should restore the use of torture against suspected terrorists, because “it works.” Even the American Psychological Association, hardly a bastion of conservative politics, briefly altered its own ethical guidelines to allow psychologists to participate in the practice of torture under the presidency of George W. Bush, further lending credence to the supposed usefulness of the practice.

So, if torture doesn’t yield trustworthy or useful information, why is it so widely used? Torture is currently practiced by between 120 and 140 countries, many of them signatories to the 1994 UN Convention Against Torture.

Silencing Dissent and Spreading Terror

The answer is simple. Although torture may not work at eliciting truthful information, that’s often not its purpose. As numerous scholars and journalists have noted, torture is widely used to silence popular dissent and to maintain social control by spreading terror. This is how the Assad regime in Syria used torture in its war against the Syrian population prior to Assad’s downfall in 2024. In Guatemala, where I worked during the tail end of that country’s genocide against its indigenous population, the bodies of tortured villagers were routinely left on roadsides and other public places where they would readily be seen—a warning of what would happen to anyone who dared to oppose the government or seek any form of social change (for an account of the use of torture in Guatemala, see my book War Torn).

And there is an even darker layer. The widespread use of torture during the genocidal reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia was certainly designed to instill widespread terror and to elicit confessions of ideological betrayal that justified the killing of a massive number of innocent civilians. However, in some of the torture centers, such as the infamous S-21 (later renamed the Museum of Genocidal Crimes), torture also reflected a kind of sadistic, ideological hatred, a desire to cause extreme suffering for no greater reason than the suffering itself. Turning again to Guatemala, during the razing of more than 600 Indian villages, horrific forms of torture were widely used against the villagers before they were killed. This use of torture served no practical purpose, yielded no useful information, and didn’t serve as an additional deterrent beyond what the massacres themselves achieved. Instead, the torture seemed to reflect a deep, sadistic impulse among the soldiers, created by their brutal training and their own experiences of victimization.

I began by asking the commonly posed question, “Does torture work?” The answer is, it depends on what we mean by “work.” It is by now clear that torture yields unreliable and misleading information, and so as a means of gathering vital intelligence, the answer is clear: Torture is not effective. However, if we ask whether torture works as a means of spreading terror and silencing popular dissent, the answer, at least in the short term, seems to be at least a partial “yes.” Repressive regimes invariably fall, and dissent, despite the use of torture, is seldom wholly silenced. But the terror and trauma generated by the widespread use of torture is well-documented, and its power to disrupt and silence organized opposition is arguably substantial.

The passionate advocacy of torture by the president of the world’s largest democracy reflects the dangerous spread of misinformation regarding the usefulness of torture to gather information. And its widespread use in much of the world reflects its destructive power as a brutal means of social control.