I'm writing a spy thriller in which at least three people (maybe more) get tortured.
In many nations, torture is now a science -- in the very literal sense, because it has been based on repeated experimentation in support of incrementally refined hypotheses.
The KUBARK manual is the CIA's torture handbook and was recently declassified. It can be found
here. The results of torture-experiments undertaken by the CIA, or funded by the CIA but undertaken in countries like Canada have been adopted in many countries, including those with opressive regimes that have been supported by the CIA. In consequence, KUBARK techniques have been adopted by many developed and developing nations.
The basic idea is to induce regression in the victims -- to the point where they are child-like in their acceptance of suggestions. This encourages them to reveal information, or to agree to things that they would previously not have agreed to.
Key techniques adopted by KUBARK include messing with a subject's sense of time, sense of place and sense of self. Isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation all cause great disorientation. Nudity and other forms of humiliation (e.g. shaving, rape, smearing with excrement) break down dignity and pride. Desecration of deeply-held beliefs break down faith. Loading up a sensory-deprived system with drugs (often LSD or PCP) exacerbates disorientation and anxiety. Alternating sensory deprivation with intense pain (inflicted through electric shocks, beatings, hot and cold baths) or fear (attacks by dogs, waterboarding) then overcomes remaining resistance.
In the case of waterboarding, the longest someone has ever lasted under clinical conditions without begging to stop was recorded at 14 seconds.
Long-term effects of torture include microfractures through the skeleton (leading to arthritis and chronic pain), split teeth, post-traumatic stress disorders, flashbacks, damage to internal organs, incontinence, eating disorders, drug dependence, short- or long-term memory loss and dissociative personality disorders.
Because of scandals associated with Abu Ghraib and other sites, there is now some political tap-dancing to redefine torture as being associated with physical pain 'similar to that of organ failure'. In practice though, what makes torture effective is not the pain and anguish it inflicts, but the
destruction of mind that causes the victim to regress -- such destruction is frequently long-term and often irreversible. The important thing to understand is that the object of torture is not just
compliance (which subjects can feign) but
regression (in which victims can no longer choose).
There's nothing entertaining, noble, heroic or titillating about torture. It's systematic and irresistible destruction of the very thing that makes us human. Most of the real scars of torture can't be seen by physical examination.
My suggestion: do not lightly inflict torture on your main characters, and not for a very long time unless you're writing a tragedy or horror story. Or let the people who inflict it be amateurs.
