5. The techniques of interrogation
6. Can torture ever be justified?
8. Secrecy and public relations
11. The victims
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11. The victims
It may be possible to set down on paper a description of all the horrors of torture in such a way that a multitude of survivors might nod and say, "Yes, that adequately portrays the pain that I felt." And yet the end product of such an exercise could be a book too painful for most people to read.John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, 2000
Who are the victims of torture?
The Roman Republic's rules governing torture followed the Greek model, but under the Roman Empire more democratic procedures were put into effect: Both slaves and freemen were subject to torture.
Irving R. Kaufman, "A Legal Remedy for International Torture?" NY Times Magazine, 11/9/1980
The vast number of victims in urban areas are members of legitimate political organizations, trade unions and youth movements, professors, women's leaders, religious figures, lawyers and journalists. In rural situations, it is unarmed peasants. villagers, and even children who are caught in the torture net.
Jean-Pierre Clavel, "Torture, an Official Way of Life in 30 Countries," NY Times, 8/4/1974
From other places the screams penetrated as little into the world as did once my own strange and uncanny howls from the vault of Breendonk. . . . Where and who are all the others about whom one learned nothing at all? . . . Somewhere, someone is crying out under torture. Perhaps in this hour, this second.
Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 1966 (reissued in English, 1980)
Some [experts] have concluded that committed dissidents who are tortured will fare better in the long run, that their beliefs give some meaning to their pain, while someone swept up in a mass internment or a random police raid may be paralyzed by what seems to be a senseless turn of events.
John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, 2000
The mental anguish of victims
Fifteen years ago the best members of the Resistance [in Algeria] feared the suffering less than the possibility of giving way under torture. Those who were silent saved the lives of all. Those who talked could not be blamed, even by those who did not give way.
Jean-Paul Sartre, Introduction to Henri Alleg, The Question, 1958
When survivors were asked . . . what they thought was the worst part of their detention, they often cited the . . . mental anguish filling the void between [torture] sessions.
John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, 2000
Although, today, physical torture is at a discount, psychological torture reaches a high degree of "perfection." Though this may well be described as progress . . . the end-effects can be almost as damning as old methods . . . for the mind can be twisted out of shape just as much as can a limb. . . . Physical wounds heal in time. Mental wounds take much longer -- sometimes never heal at all -- for the mind is infinitely more sensitive and impressionable than is flesh.
Edwin J. Henri, Methods of Torture and Execution, 1966
To be arrested knowing you will be tortured is to know absolute helplessness before absolute power. . . . You are a creature now, their creature. And they are free to torment you. Any way they wish. They can now inflict any pain or deprivation upon you, and for any reason: amusement, boredom, habit, even simple routine, the routine by which you will be broken, piece by piece.
Kate Millett, The Politics of Cruelty, 1994
It does not have to be something as extreme as torture. Arrest is enough and, if need be, the first blow one receives. . . . In an interrogation, blows have only scant criminological significance. . . . Simple blows, which really are entirely incommensurable with actual torture. . . . but for the person who suffers them they are still experiences that leave deep marks . . . The first blow brings home to the prisoner that he is helpless, and thus it already contains in the bud everything that is to come.
Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 1966 (reissued in English, 1980)
One of the worst aspects was psychological torture. You were in a very small cell, with a very dim light, and all night you could hear loud beatings and screams. Some were real and some were on tape recordings. They would play the tapes all night so we couldn't get any sleep.
Spyros Kousaris, quoted in Steven V. Roberts, "Tortures of Junta Era Still Haunting Greeks," NY Times, 1/10/1975
The prisoner [who is] told that the screams from an adjacent chamber are a parent's or partner's is being subjected to a terrible form of torment -- even if it subsequently emerges that the claim was false. Helplessness in the face of another's suffering can, in its way, be as bad as physical torture.
Michael Kerrigan, The Instruments of Torture, 2001
All coercion that leads to confession is torture. And most of all torture is fear: if you knew it would last only a stated interval, perhaps you could bear it; it's the not knowing, the uncertainty of menace, that drives you to panic.Not just what they do to you, but what they may do to you next, what they have the power to do to you, at any moment, at every moment. Torture is all potentiality, endless possibility.
Kate Millett, The Politics of Cruelty, 1994
A torture that takes its victim to the very threshold of death before laughingly slamming shut the door touches the very deepest human fear. Manipulation of fear has always been as integral to the act of torture as the application of physical pain; hence . . . fear is used by torturers not as an end in itself, but for its capacity to break down an individuals's sense of self, destroying in the process all resolve and sense of purpose.
Michael Kerrigan, The Instruments of Torture, 2001
Some of the most brutal tortures are the simplest, requiring no imagination, no technology, and little effort on the part of the torturer. . . . Sleep deprivation falls into the category of tortures . . . that are favored because they. . . allow interrogators to proclaim that they never laid a finger on the men or women in their charge. Humiliation . . . often adds an additional layer to the torture, producing self-loathing in the prisoner, again with little effort by the torturer.
John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, 2000
"Sleep management." This apparently benign term . . . disguises a form of torture that has long been popular because it requires no special equipment and leaves no marks on the body. Widely used in the Middle Ages on suspected witches by inquisitors, it was called the tormentum insomniae. . . . After being kept awake for a hundred hours or so, almost anybody will confess to almost anything, from flying through the night sky on a broomstick to being a capitalist spy.
Adam Hochschild, "What's in a Word? Torture," NY Times Op Ed, 5/23/2004
All torture, arguably, has been at base psychological, its physical abuses directed ultimately at the mind. Only in the 20th century, though, did torturers learn to bypass the body, applying their torments directly to the suffering psyche. An advance? Some would say so, pointing to the rent flesh and broken limbs of the torture victims of ages past: those who have actually undergone psychological torture would scarcely be so sanguine.
Michael Kerrigan, The Instruments of Torture, 2001
The lasting wounds of survivors
The Gestapo tortures. But that was a matter until now for the somebodies who were tortured and who displayed their scars at antifascist conferences. That suddenly you yourself are the Somebody, is grasped only with difficulty. That, too, is a kind of alienation.
Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 1966 (reissued in English, 1980)
Only a tiny fraction of working torturers will ever be punished, and those who are can expect their punishment to be slight compared to their crime. It seems a very small leap to argue that torture is the perfect crime. There are exceptions, yes, but in the vast majority of cases, only the victim pays.
John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, 2000
What was inflicted on me in the unspeakable vault in Breendonk [Belgium] was by far not the worst form of torture. . . . What did happen to me there . . . was relatively harmless and it left no conspicuous scars on my body. And yet, twenty-two years after it occurred, on the basis of an experience that in no way probed the entire range of possibilites, I dare to assert that torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself.
Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 1966 (reissued in English, 1980)
When I thought about putting my life back together and asked God for help, I knew it would take a miracle: nothing and no one would ever be able to give me back what I had lost. . . . I still have the horrible past with me -- I carry it in my memory and in my skin and I always will -- but . . . as I improve, I have faith and hope and trust again, on my good days.
Sister Dianna Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, 2002
What becomes of a torture victim . . . has become something of a medical specialty . . . . The forces unleashed by a man only doing his job, a man simply following orders, a man who may not know even the name of his victim, are extraordinarily powerful. Long after the torturer and his or her prey are dead, the acts committed in a hidden place -- perhaps in a matter of a few minutes or hours -- live on.
John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, 2000
Even on my good days, the smell of cigarette smoke reminds me of the burns the torturers inflicted on me. . . . I jump if someone runs up behind me, and if someone stands too close or stares at me, I back away. . . . I've learned to avoid situations that bring back the pain -- on my good days, when I'm feeling assertive.
Sister Dianna Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, 2002
Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one's fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules. One who was martyred is a defenseless prisoner of fear. It is fear that henceforth reigns over him.
Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 1966 (reissued in English, 1980)
The man who feels "nothing personal" against his victim, who takes comfort in the belief that he is not as bad as some other torturer . . . because his victim did not die, never sees the extent of his damage, never considers that he has assaulted generations yet unborn.
John Conroy, Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People, 2000
It would be totally senseless to try and describe here the pain that was inflicted on me. . . . The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling are as incomparable as they are indescribable. They mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate. . . . Whoever is overcome by pain through torture experiences his body as never before. In self-negation, his flesh becomes a total reality. . . . Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected.
Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, 1966 (reissued in English, 1980)
Rehabilitation of survivors
Most Americans think little about torture . . . and other human rights abuses. . . . Our stomachs drop when we hear the word. The Images run so deep that no one doubts the devastation torture leaves or the need for protection and care of its survivors; but the subject is so perverse and ugly that most of us want never to think about it. . . . Not knowing what to do -- neither how to stop it nor how to aid the victims -- accentuates everyone's feeling of helplessness and vulnerability.
Douglas Johnson, Executive Director, The Center for Victims of Torture, Foreword to Glenn R. Randall and Ellen L. Lutz, Serving Survivors of Torture, 1991
The public must be educated not only about the fact that traumatic human rights abuses take place, but that persons in their community suffer from post-traumatic physical and psychological sequelae as a result. People need to be aware that survivors, because of their psychological profiles, are likely to be poor advocates for their own needs and may need encouragement to seek help.
Glenn R. Randall and Ellen L. Lutz, Serving Survivors of Torture, 1991
I am but one of millions worldwide who has ascended from the torture chamber. In that place of unspeakable evil . . . I found kindness and community. Another woman reached out to me. She told me to be strong. I would like . . . to reach over differences in experiences, to reach out and tell whoever might read my words to be strong. A black blindfold holds every wave length in the spectrum of light -- holds it and keeps it pressed against the head, as if to say, Don't forget. Even if you can't see the light, it's there.
Sister Dianna Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, 2002
Torture assaults every aspect of one's humanity . . . We need to overcome our fantasies and fears of torture and get to work aiding its victims in our communities. In this way, we defeat torture's purpose and reclaim the world for our own.
Douglas Johnson, Executive Director, The Center for Victims of Torture, Foreword to Glenn R. Randall and Ellen L. Lutz, Serving Survivors of Torture, 1991
Some 400,000 victims of torture worldwide have made their way to the United States. We are a global leader in supporting the rehabilitation of victims of torture. Recently in a report to the U.N., we recognized that there have been occasional incidents of torture in the United States. This shows that even where extensive procedural and substantive protections exist, vigilance in preventing torture is necessary.
U.S. Mission to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), 11/17/1999
In 2002, more than 80,000 victims were assisted through the Fund with the support of donors.
UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture, 4/2/2003
The United States helps the advance toward a world free of torture by a number of means, including a $5 million contribution to the UN Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture. In addition we support torture victims' treatment centers in the U.S. and abroad. . . . We continue to be appalled by the actions of governments that use torture or turn a blind eye to its occurrence. They may try to escape international scrutiny and accountability for their actions, but as long as torturers around the world spread fear and suffering, the United States will not waver in its commitment to eliminate torture.
U.S. Department of State, 6/26/2003
While working as a missionary in Guatemala, I was abducted by security forces and taken to a secret torture center in the capital city. So I entered a world from which few return. . . . But I was different. I was an American. And on that November day in 1989, I escaped with my life. . . . And as long as I am alive, I have to use my life to work against the practice of torture. Although I would like to be in the classroom, teaching children, I hope I am making the world safer for them by teaching people about what torture is and what it does.
Sister Dianna Ortiz, The Blindfold's Eyes: My Journey from Torture to Truth, 2002