Wednesday, October 04, 2006

They say everyone breaks; it's just a matter of time. I don't know if that's true, but I'm willing to accept it. On the face of it, that suggests the best you can do is delay, but you can never win. It turns out, however, that you can use that against your captors.

Let's suppose you are captured by those who would torture you to get information from you. You must assume you will break. Once you know that, you can use it against your captors. Well before you actually break, you start telling them things. You tell them things that are completely true, things that are mostly true, and things that are fabrications. You tell isolated facts and whole stories and everything in between. You spew a barrage of information, within which you bury the truth. They'll be able to verify some of it and disprove some of it, but most of it will be ambiguous. After all, if they knew that much there would be no need to torture you.

Your goal is to prevent them from learning the truth so they can defeat your cause. What if they hear the truth, but consider it a falsehood, or if they hear a lie and call it truth? In that case, you have succeeded, even if at some point the truth came out of your mouth. This is even something you can train for, in much the same way an improvisational comedy troupe practices. If I can think of this, I'm sure Al Qaeda can too. In fact, knowing that your victim is using this strategy would help you not one bit. By overloading them with false information, you make yourself useless as an intelligence source, even if you know lots of true and useful information, even if you tell it to them, and even if they break you.

Furthermore, you can do more than just make your interrogation pointless. If the information you give them sounds reliable, but clashes with other intelligence, you introduce uncertainty and destroy the value of those other sources. This will happen regardless of whether you're telling the truth or a lie. Your torturers will know well the limits of torture, but their bosses might not. You might not be able to save yourself, but you can protect your cause.

( issues )