Why False Confessions Can Be Helpful

The New York Times reports that a government chart listing "alternative interrogation" techniques to be used at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp was actually plagiarized from an unlikely source:

The 1957 article from which the chart was copied was entitled "Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War" and written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist then working for the Air Force, who died in 2003. Mr. Biderman had interviewed American prisoners returning from North Korea, some of whom had been filmed by their Chinese interrogators confessing to germ warfare and other atrocities.

Last May, I blogged about the demonstrably false torture-fueled confessions of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. What I did not realize at the time was that the torture techniques used by the U.S. government were specifically noted for their usefulness in generating false confessions. So assuming the executive branch officials in charge of regulating the torture program aren't idiots, and I don't think they are, why would they knowingly use techniques that are specifically associated with false confessions?

Maybe it's because from the perspective of the so-called War on Terror, false confessions are even more useful than true confessions. The government doesn't really need dramatic confessions in order to keep a high-profile terrorist suspect behind bars, but dramatic confessions, whether they're true or not, serve a larger purpose.

For example: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed claimed, under torture, to be the mastermind of the September 11th attacks. Osama bin Laden is still on the lam--but because professing 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is in custody, the United States can send the message that people don't get to organize major attacks against U.S. civilian targets without facing serious consequences. That's something that would-be terrorists really should know.

The false confession also allows our government to project competence, which makes foreign policy decisions easier. If we already have the 9/11 mastermind in custody, then pressure from Americans to strong-arm regional ally Pakistan into helping us capture other 9/11 planners is reduced. Fewer questions are asked about the efficacy of our foreign intelligence efforts as a whole, and the possible distraction posed by an elective war in Iraq.

Our mistake as observers, in other words, is that we look at torture through the lens of criminal justice instead of through the lens of politics. It's not about getting accurate confessions that would work in a civilian court; it's about getting plausible confessions that work as anti-terrorist propaganda. And when the real planners of the September 11th attacks are ostensibly hiding away somewhere in the mountains of western Pakistan, eliciting plausible false confessions from the suspects we do have just makes good political sense.

Does it make moral sense? Of course not. But if we look at the War on Terror as a new Cold War rather than an international criminal justice effort, if we look at it as a sort of American jihad, then it becomes easier for our leaders to get away with making political decisions that don't make moral sense.

Related: American Torture Techniques