July 1963: CIA Counterintelligence Manual Warns that Torture Produces Unreliable Information

The CIA’s KUBARK interrogation manual is straightforward about the unreliability of torture as a means to acquire useful intelligence. (KUBARK is a CIA cryptogram for the agency itself.) The “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation” manual states: “Intense pain is quite likely to produce false confessions, concocted as a means of escaping from distress. A time-consuming delay results, while investigation is conducted and the admissions are proven untrue. During this respite the interrogatee can pull himself together. He may even use the time to think up new, more complex’ admissions’ that take still longer to disprove.” The KUBARK manual is the product of over 10 years of research and testing, based on the experiences of US soldiers captured and tortured by Chinese interrogators. Waterboarding, called a method of “touchless torture,” elicited false confessions from the captured soldiers that the US planned to use biological weapons against North Korea. [Washington Post, 10/5/2006; Vanity Fair, 12/16/2008]