Guantanamo and the "Game" of Torture

Recently the former prison guard Brandon Neely traveled to the UK to meet Tipton Three and apologize for their unjust detainment and torture in the Guantanamo detainment camp (See BBC report). Tipton Three (Ruhal Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul and Asif Iqbal) are British citizens of Pakistani origin, who while spending their holidays in Pakistan, made a trip to Afghanistan in 2001 to do some sight-seeing and spoke dope. Their trip coincided with the American entering Afghanistan and after the three men were arrested, they were swiftly shipped to Cuba, where they spend more than two years in detention, released only in March 2004. Tipton Three became known with the dramatic documentary "The Road to Guantanamo" and campaigned for the rights of Guantanamo detainees.

Image from www.ccrjustice.org

Torture has persisted over centuries and has not become a history as Victor Hugo hoped for. The medieval torture instruments like the spiked chairs, painful cuts and iron maiden have been replaced with more sophisticated methods like water-boarding, exposure to temperature extremes, sleep deprivation, loud music, yelling and light control. Why is torture still applied and what do scholars say about the state institutions of torture?

This dilemma is not new: either the crime is certain or it is not; if certain, no punishment awaits him other than that which has been established by the laws, the torture is useless, because the criminal's confession is useless; if it is not certain, then one must not torture an innocent man, because in the eyes of the law, he is a man whose crimes have not been proven.... Beccaria with his famous treatise "Dei delitti e delle pene" made the first condemnations of the death penalty and determined that torture favors strength over weaknesses and guilt over innocence. 

Wantchekon and Healy explored a signaling game of incomplete information where the state is either motivated to extract information or to intimidate and exercise social control. They divided they agents in state, torturers and victims, where the torturers could be either professionals, zealots or sadist (Vonnegut's Ronald Weary fits so perfectly in the last category!!!). The victims are four types: weak and guilty (WG), strong and guilty (SG), weak and innocent (WI) and strong and innocent (SI) - this in order to test Beccaria's second thesis. The probability distribution of the torturers as well as of the victims sums to one. 

The state would impose torture when it's utility from the revealed information from the weak and guilty types exceeds the losses of  e.g. economic sanctions, which would follow public and international outrage. Solving the game sequence with the Bayesian equilibrium on levels of revealed information and sets of applied force determines than torture is less likely to occur when the victims are strong. So a way to reduce torture is to replace the institutions of the weak victim with the institutions of the strong victim. E.g. One could create such a culture by cultivating solidarity among those in prison or detention camps or by teaching potential victims what to expect from torturers and how to react. Another is the Amnesty-prove way of increasing the costs to the state through international and domestic pressure (which has eventually lead to closing of Guantanamo Bay).

Professor Koppl from the Forensic Science Administration has looked into the the comparative institutional epistemics. Epistemic systems are social processes generating judgments of truth and falsity. Different institutions would tend to produce different epistemic results and the nature of the problem would determine which institutions would provide the true judgement. His mathematical model ascertains the low epistemic efficiency of torture and is also consistent with the research of Darius Rejali,  who has stated that torture interrogations rarely yield better results than traditional human intelligence.