elizabeth tsurkov wurde im märz 2023 in bagdad entführt wurde und nach 903 tagen haft und folter freigelassen. im atlantic schreibt sie über diese zeit.
I had no interest in “resisting” interrogation under torture—after all, I had nothing real to hide, nothing I would not want to confess. So I freely admitted to whatever they seemed to want to hear: that I worked for the CIA and was a Mossad spy. To be both, of course, was hardly possible, but as these men beat me again and again over the next 14 weeks, I learned their bizarre conspiracy theories—and tried to match my fables to theirs.
As my experience showed, a heavy reliance on physical abuse makes for proficient torturers, not skilled interrogators. Again and again, torture has proved to produce false confessions and bad intelligence. The only knowledge that torture provides is the ultimate confirmation bias: information about the threats facing the regime that is entirely in line with the worldview of the torturers, who characteristically share the regime’s generalized paranoia.
