More than a decade following the end of the CIA’s torture program, scholars continue to grapple with interrogational torture. Ron E. Hassner’s Anatomy of Torture and Tortured Logic by Erin M. Kearns and Joseph K. Young are recent and useful additions to this growing literature.

Anatomy of Torture draws on Spanish Inquisition records to examine whether interrogational torture elicited reliable information not obtainable otherwise. Hassner argues that torture sometimes provided Inquisitors with “reliable” and “accurate” information, albeit “under very restricted conditions” (pp. 116, 3, 118). Drawing a distinction between “exploratory” and “corroborative” interrogational torture, that is, torture for novel versus corroborative information, respectively, he argues that the Inquisition tended to employ exploratory torture early in its investigations and that this use of torture mostly resulted in false or misleading information in addition to information hiding (pp. 3, 94–96). Thus, it was much less helpful to the Inquisition than corroborative torture, which tended to be employed later in investigations to “confirm or reject” existing information possessed by the Inquisition (p. 3). The middle chapters examining records of Inquisitorial proceedings in Ciudad Real (1484–1515), Toledo (1575–1610), and Mexico City (1589–1591 and 1594–1601) constitute the empirical heart of the book. They follow a review of what we know about contemporary interrogational torture in the first chapter, and a challenge to three myths about the Spanish Inquisition in the second chapter. Despite his repeated emphasis on the “drastically” different conditions and “entirely alien” “social, political, and religious setting” of Inquisitorial torture, Hassner nevertheless draws some lessons at the end of the book for contemporary interrogational torture, including that torture can generate “modest intelligence” but that it is “slow,” “contagious,” “provokes blowback,” and “fails when it degenerates into confessional torture” (pp. 18, 118, 123, 128, 132, 126). The epilogue grapples with what he sees as the ethical implications of his study for policy makers, torture critics, and scholars.

Hassner opens the book by stating that his answer to “does torture work?” “will frustrate … and infuriate” both torture critics and torture proponents (p. 1). Perhaps so, but not for the reasons he gives. Unsurprisingly, none of the works by scholars or former interrogators he cites ever say torture “never works’’ as he avows, but instead acknowledge that torture can work, which is also different from claiming that it works simpliciter (pp. 19, 139). Similarly, proponents generally acknowledge that torture doesn’t always work; they just don’t think that those problems outweigh torture’s utility. In short, Hassner’s conclusion that torture “occasionally produced truthful information … [but] [m]ost of the time, torture provided scant information or misleading information” is right in line with most serious scholarship on interrogational torture and would only infuriate the strawmen who do not exist (p. 34).

Second, Hassner uncritically accepts the validity of Inquisition records, which he claims display “fastidious” and “careful documentation” free of “bias” (pp. 22, 38, 66). This despite his acknowledgment that the Inquisition was self-funding based on property confiscation (p. 35) and took evidence from “familiars,” servants of the Inquisition paid “for assisting the prosecutor” and enjoying other privileges (pp. 43, 162n18). Lastly, and most problematically, throughout the book Hassner equates objective truth with what the Inquisition found “useful” or “satisfactory” or corroborated by other testimony or the ultimate outcome of a trial (pp. 42, 55, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64, 65, 116, 140). Indeed, Hassner discounts the ease with which an innocent could confess to actions and name others as having participated in them even under no leading questioning, given common knowledge of Jewish and Muslim practices (pp. 43, 48). Moreover, the Inquisition often promulgated an Edict of Faith identifying the specific activities by which they claimed secretly practicing Jews and other heretics might be recognized, thus providing detailed material for false confessions and accusations. Certainly some of the victims discussed in Anatomy of Torture gave up objectively truthful, accurate information under torture that they did not give up without torture. We just do not know how many, which is what we need to know to answer the efficacy question. In the epilogue, Hassner rightly calls for more research, especially archival research, on interrogational torture. As the first political scientist who has explored such material to examine torture’s efficacy, he has advanced that agenda by demonstrating the difficulties that lie on the road ahead.

Tortured Logic, the subtitle of which more accurately describes the book, investigates the determinants of support for torture in a series of experiments (one per chapter), different in design and methodology. The first experiment is a traditional laboratory-based one with university students viewing edited clips from the TV show 24 portraying torture as effective, ineffective, or watching interrogations without torture. The second experiment measures support for torture after viewing edited TV clips but is based on a YouGov national sample and adds in videos containing rapport-building interrogations. Rather than asking about support for torture directly, experiment three asked Amazon Mechanical Turk respondents to read vignettes varying suspect-interrogator ethnicity dyads, interrogation location, and interrogation type, and then to answer seven questions addressing various definitional, legal, and moral aspects of torture. Kearns and Young also creatively took advantage of the chance for a natural experiment by rerunning the experiment six months later, immediately following the release of the Senate torture report in December 2014, thus generating two waves in the study. The last experiment (also with an MTurk sample) returned to more direct measures of support, but employed a conjoint design varying six expert types, four suspect citizenships, six suspect goals or types of terrorist groups, and three likely outcomes in each scenario. Each subject was given five pairs of scenarios and was asked to rate their support for torture of each independently, as well as to identify the scenario in which they would support torture more in the interrogation.

It is possible to highlight here only some of the interesting results. First, Kearns and Young note that some Americans have “fixed” views on torture that are not moved by contextual factors such as those in their experiments, while others do shift their views under those conditions (p. 155). In the first three experiments only one in four fell into the fluid category, supporting their claim that “only a small subset of individuals explain variance in aggregate support for torture” (p. 109) whereas in the fourth experiment this proportion jumped to one in three, perhaps as a result of paired vignettes in the conjoint design (pp. 152, 155). Second, their experiments confirm existing data that seeing or reading about the effectiveness of interrogational torture drives up support for it. More troubling, support for torture increased or did not decrease even after treatments showing it was ineffective or that rapport-building approaches were effective. Moreover, Kearns and Young found baseline support for torture even in cases in which it wasn’t effective, suggesting that at least some “support for torture is more punitive than instrumental” (p. 76, also p. 153). Finally, their respondents do not appear to be fooling themselves; the vignettes in the third experiment with physical and psychological torture were (correctly) identified as torture and considered illegal and immoral.

Aside from these larger points, it is difficult to know what to take away from the four studies together. National identity of the torture victim seems to matter in some contexts or frames, but not in others; the degree of expertise about the effectiveness of interrogational torture seem to have little effect on popular support for the practice. While issue salience created by the release of the Senate torture report had no effect on attitudes in any of the experimental conditions, it did have a large effect on increasing the rate of petition signing in the second wave, signaling a disjuncture between beliefs and preferences, on the one hand, and political action, on the other. Ten interviews with interrogation and torture experts, all opposed to torture and whose views are sprinkled throughout the text, add anecdotal color and commentary but sit uncomfortably aside the experimental approach that drives the book. Also uncomfortable are operationalizations of “us” [Americans] as “someone who has a white, American-sounding name,” rather than an “Arabic name” and Chinese and Syrians as “groups different from ourselves” as opposed to those in the United Kingdom, who constitute “a group similar to ourselves” (pp. 95, 97, 108, 137).

On the basis of the claim that torture can generate some actionable intelligence under conditions that almost never prevail today, Anatomy of Torture argues that torture critics should avoid arguments about efficacy and instead argue against it on moral grounds. The latter, Hassner argues, will be more persuasive, citing a since-published survey (Ron E. Hassner, “Persuasive and Unpersuasive Critiques of Torture,” Perspectives on Politics, 2022) (p. 147). Tortured Logic supports that prescription, insofar as apparently exposure to any form of counterterrorism interrogation—including ineffectively torturous or effective rapport building—apparently increases or at least fails to decrease support for torture. Similarly, in line with the survey just cited, people who displayed less support for torture in Kearns and Young’s first experiment posttest, cited “harmful’’ and “illegal” more than “ineffective” as reasons for their shift (p. 72).

Hassner asks whether torture critics “should set aside sound moral arguments that fail to persuade” and answers in the negative (p. 147). But the same is true for efficacy arguments. We can all agree that “[t]orture critics [and this reviewer would say proponents!] should make arguments that are true regardless of whether they convince, not arguments that are convincing regardless of whether they are true” (ibid.). Sadly, that is just as apposite for arguments against torture’s efficacy as it is for moral arguments.

Anatomy of Torture and Tortured Logic each offer a novel approach to old questions surrounding interrogational torture’s efficacy and perceptions of efficacy in public support for interrogational torture. Each is also a cautionary tale, not only substantively in terms of their respective subjects but also methodologically about how to study those subjects. Hassner’s claim that torture is not very effective even under the most favorable conditions nowhere near obtaining in modern democracies reinforces skepticism about torture’s ability to elicit intelligence information as part of modern counterterrorism strategy. The methodological difficulties with archival sources reveal some of the obstacles scholars will face as new archives (e.g., in France, in Algeria) become available. Kearns and Young’s findings that many Americans support torture even when they think torture is ineffective provides a sobering corrective to our understanding of why and when Americans support torturing terrorist suspects. The difficulties inherent in experimental surveys suggest it will be difficult to pin down Americans’ labile attitudes toward torture. The fact that both are cautionary tales methodologically appears to be due less to any fault of the authors than it is due to the complexity and difficulty of the subject matter.