Does torture work? Donald Trump and the CIA.

Abstract

President Trump says that ‘torture works’1,2 His office has released a draft order3 stating an intention to make ‘modifications and additions’ to the policies the US employs for the ‘... safe, lawful, and effective interrogation of enemy combatants captured in the fight against radical Islamism’. This not only worries human rights groups, but it also suggests that he has taken no account of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s Study of the CIA‘s detention and interrogation activity from 2001–2009,4 on which he must surely have been briefed. This report concluded (as did the CIA) that torturing prisoners was not an effective means of obtaining intelligence or cooperation. It describes Orwellian ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques including slapping, walling, stress positioning, cramped confinement, sleep deprivation, confinement with insects, waterboarding, sexual …