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Earlier this month, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing report on the Central Intelligence Agency's use of torture after Sept. 11. It found, among other things, that harsh interrogation techniques did not help Americans find Osama Bin Laden, contrary to CIA claims.
In the ensuing days, national
news reporters turned to a Portland expert on torture—Reed College professor
Darius Rejali—to help them make sense of the report's context. The author of a
definitive book on the topic, Torture and
Democracy, the 55-year-old Rejali grew up in Iran before moving to the
United States to attend Swarthmore College near Philadelphia.
He's taught in Reed's
political science department for 25 years. And although he studies a dark
topic, the college's alumni magazine once described Rejali as lovable and lighthearted—"a short
and portly Iranian American with an easy, gregarious laugh, [who] wears his
erudition lightly; he is as likely to quote Harry Potter, Lewis Carroll,
or Star Trek as Weber, Locke, or Foucault.â
Rejali recently answered
a few questions from WW about the
conditions that create acceptance of torture and the reasons why some Americans
might feel sympathy for the rank-and-file citizens who carried out our leaders'
despicable orders.
WW: Who are the people who become torturers for a
government, typically?
Rejali: We don't know the people to whom you refer or if
they are typical. I can only talk about the cases that come to light. I've
been keeping track of how many torturers describe what they do to journalists, academics
or doctors. At this point, I've counted slightly fewer than 140 cases since
World War II—excluding Nazi torturers. It's not a lot and it covers only a
handful of countries—most of the torturers are Greek, Brazilian, Japanese,
Iranian, and American from earlier conflicts.
What do
they tell us? Are they just "bad apples?"
What they tell us coincides with what social
scientists know from other circumstances, namely, that torturers are not
sadists. They are chosen because they are patriotic, loyal, disciplined and can
keep secrets. To put it another way, they do not have dispositions
to torture. They are put in situations where torture seems logical,
normal, and a safe way to proceed.
What
kinds of situations make torture seem "normal?"
Some famous experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and Phillip Zimbardo have identified what these circumstances are and how they can move entirely normal people to do terrible things. What Milgram and Zimbardo show is that most of us would torture if put in situations that are without clear authority, have unclear rules, no punishment for violation of rules, and no regular supervision. For serial violators, these fuzzy backgrounds can be intensified with peer pressure and the fear that if they stopped torturing they themselves might become victims of the bureaucracy.
In some ways it sounds like maybe we should have
sympathy for torturers. Do they have any hope of getting help?
Your question assumes that participating in torture
always produces trauma. Actually, this is not the case. Trauma arises through
toxic levels of guilt and shame, which then generates symptoms we would call
post-traumatic stress disorder. No one can anticipate whether they will feel
guilt or shame in these cases, or how long it may take for its onset to occur.
This is beyond their powers. A torturer may have no problems for a while,
and then one day, things start to change.
It sounds
like you're saying different people react differently to carrying out torture.
It appears to be the case that torturers with
strong ideological or religious commitments have fewer and sometimes no
difficulties. This does suggest to me that torturers in democratic
societies are somewhat more vulnerable to guilt and shame than those from
authoritarian societies. After all, typically we justify torture by necessity;
generally acknowledging it's a terrible thing to do. I suspect if you start
there, feeling shame and guilt—particularly when the results are negligible and
the costs are high—could be inevitable.
Is PTSD the
only concern?
Burnout is a bigger issue with torture than
PTSD. Torture is a labor-intensive activity. Torturers are more
exhausted than, say, members of death squads—who have, from the torturer's
perspective, a more dramatic and less demanding occupation. Unsurprisingly
torturers suffer from insomnia, hyper-sensitivity, nervousness, emotional
problems, alcoholism and potential suicidal behavior. Again, this
phenomenon is not evenly distributed. The rank-and-file actors are more burned
out than those who gave the order to do the violence. An aggravating factor is
living in secrecy, deprived of the support and understanding of friends and
family. This sharply contrasts with their supervisors, who do not engage in the
violence. Supervisors are able to take pride in their work and draw on their
support networks.
How should Americans view the people who carried
out the interrogations? I'm still wondering if, in a perverse way, we should be
sympathetic to them.
One thing we tend to forget is that torture does
not happen without context. It happens within bureaucracies that have many
people who don't torture, but who are, whether they like it or not, forced to
witness these events. These include people like guards, but also sometimes
secretaries who transcribe interrogation tapes. All of these people may
suffer from burnout or trauma. We also know that in some cases, the families of
torturers suffer—if not from violence directed at them, but later, in terms of
the shame that children feel for their parents.
I don't
think many people have thought about the secretaries who transcribe
interrogation tapes. What else?
Now to your question: a Tibetan monk, Palden
Gyatso, was asked what he feared most while suffering decades of torture in
Chinese prisons. He had been incarcerated as a young man and spent most of his
life in prison. He said, "What I feared most was that I would lose compassion
for my torturers."
I agree. I do not think it helps to think of torturers as
aliens, people not like us, and torture as something so far from our normal
lives that we cannot treat torturers as human beings. When we treat torturers
as sadistic aliens, we make torture something beyond our ability to address.
Moreover we dehumanize torturers, and that is always the way to other forms of
cruelty.
How do we
avoid dehumanizing torturers?
I think the important thing is to regard what
torturers have in common with us. As I have said, most of us under the
right conditions could be induced to do horrible things. The more we understand
torture as a human problem, the more we can be in a position to address it in a
humane way.
I do not think this is a particularly Buddhist practice. Ecclesiastes
tells us the same thing: "I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under
the sun. And behold, the tears of the oppressed, and they had no one to comfort
them! On the side of their oppressors there was power, and there was no one to
comfort them." (Eccles. 4:1)
What
about the people at the top?
We can be proud of children who are raised to be soldiers
and policemen, but no one I know has ever said to me that they want to raise
their child to be a torturer. I have sympathy for the torturers, but far
less for those who sacrifice other people's children and order them to torture.
My best advice to those rank-and-file officers who are asked to torture is,
never say yes to torture. No one will ever thank you for it, and the people
slapping you on the back today, will be the first to throw you under the bus
tomorrow. Those who claim to be pro-torture today will not lift a finger
to help you when you need them later.
When Chilean torturers left service they
were called manchado by their old
friends and colleagues—it means stained. These are not the friends that will
fund veterans' services for torturers. They won't want anyone to know what
you did, much less give you treatment for doing it. Pro-torture apologists may
defend themselves vociferously on television, but they will not establish a
Society for the Reintegration of Torturers into Society.
Can you talk about the effects of interrogation
programs on civilian law enforcement agencies? How are these techniques showing
up in police interactions with civilians in the U.S.?
I have said many times that torture has a very long
shadow—torture follows soldiers back from war. After all, if you did security
work in a war, what kind of job would you look for when you return? Policing.
And so unsurprisingly, there is a historical record of torture techniques that
appeared on a battlefield that later appear in a neighborhood near you.
How long
does it take for the effects of war to reach home?
As near as I can tell, it takes about ten years for
techniques that appear in the battlefront to appear in the home country—a
phenomena I call transference.
What can
you tell us about transference?
Transference happened to the French twice in the
twentieth century, and twice in American history. The technique we now call
"water boarding" was unknown in American policing until after American soldiers
returned from the Philippines in 1905, and by the 1930s it was common
throughout the country in police stations large and small. And Americans
brought back from the Vietnam War magneto-electrical torture to Chicago in the
1970s, a story well documented in John Conroy's Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary
People. It seems clear now that a group of men under the command of one of
Chicago's top policemen tortured prisoners for nearly twenty years.
Have
there been recent examples of transference?
I haven't seen any accounts of transference in the
area of torture in the latest news reports of blue-on-black violence. I'm not
surprised because that phenomenon— namely, the kind of investment post 9-11 in
policing to prepare them for terrorism—does not pertain to the phenomenon I'm
describing, namely transference of specific interrogation techniques.
The issue
of police militarization has its own sociology and history. What I'm
talking about is a very specific process by which returning torturers seek
positions in law enforcement and then bring to bear techniques they learned in
the battlefield.
Final
thoughts?
Torture then has a long shadow—in terms of the effects it has on the
victims, the torturers, and the societies from which they come. We will be
dealing with its effects in the United States for a very long time.
WWeek 2015