Psyche, Science, and Society

Horton asks Darius Rejali six questions about torture

February 14th, 2008

Darius Rejali is one of the most knowledgeable scholars on torture, a rather dubious distinction. I am currently slowly working my way through his encyclopedic Torture and Democracy, wherein he argues that international human rights monitoring and democracy have contributed to the development by states of so-called “clean tortures.” Clean tortures include SERE-style psychological torture, but also electric torture, waterboarding, beating the soles of the feet, and even tasers and the like.

Scott Horton poses six questions for Rejali. The interview bears reading several times as it contains much wisdom.

Six Questions for Darius Rejali, Author of ‘Torture and Democracy’

Reed College Professor Darius Rejali is one of the world’s leading thinkers and writers on the subject of torture and the consequences of its use for modern society. Princeton University Press has just published his magisterial study of torture and how it has developed as a social and moral issue with a focus on developments through the last century. Rejali tracks the question in many different settings and societies–from Athens in its golden age to the French colonial wars, totalitarian states in the mid-twentieth century, down to America in the Age of George W. Bush. I put six questions to Rejali about his book and its relevance to the current debate in the United States.

1. Your new book, ‘Torture and Democracy,’ reflects a lengthy engagement with the subject of torture as a phenomenon over a vast stretch of time and among many different societies. But in the preface, you start by relating something about your own background as an Iranian-American, trying to understand how torture was transforming Iran and complicating its evolution in modern times. Did developments in Iran lead you to this subject? In what ways do you think torture has affected the political culture of Iran and its extremely awkward relations with the rest of the world?

Most people think torture is a barbaric survivor and that it would disappear over time with progress. This is a mistake, and my experience growing up in Iran taught me that and led me to write Torture and Modernity: Self, State and Society in Iran (1994). I used Iran to show that while old ritualistic, public torture would disappear over time, other tortures would survive and new techniques would appear, let’s call these modern torture.

Prof. Darius Rejali

I remember one distinguished expert who reviewed my work said, basically, how can Rejali say torture is part of modernity? If that was true, America would torture too. It really was amazing, in retrospect, how willfully blind people wanted to be. I grew up in Iran at a time when the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, did not hesitate torturing Islamic and Marxist insurgents. No one thought torture was something incompatible with cars, fast food, washing machines and other parts of modern life. I remember talking to a high-ranking SAVAK officer years after the Shah was gone, and he certainly felt he played an important role in modernization. It wasn’t the last time I’ve heard torturers say how important they are in making their country safe for economic opportunity.

Another point: Everyone forgets that the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 was the revolution against torture. When the Shah criticized Khomayni as a blackrobed Islamic medieval throwback, Khomayni replied, look who is talking, the man who tortures. This was powerful rhetoric for recruiting people, then as it is now. People joined the revolutionary opposition because of the Shah’s brutality, and they remembered who installed him. If anyone wants to know why Iranians hated the US so, all they have to do is ask what America’s role was in promoting torture in Iran. Torture not only shaped the revolution, it was the factor that has deeply poisoned the relationship of Iran with the West. So why trust the West again? And the Iranian leadership doesn’t.

2. One of the themes that circulates through your book is that we are mistaken in attaching torture only to non-democratic states; your special focus is on how democratic states use torture, and you give examples stretching from Athens in the golden age to America under George W. Bush, but with France in its waning colonial phase as perhaps the best illustration of them all. But isn’t it the case that modern democratic concepts rest on the rejection of torture? I think back to figures like Voltaire. When he describes torture in great detail and attacks its crudeness, its stupidity—as in his brilliant description of the cruel execution of the 19-year-old chevalier de La Barre—he seems to be making a political statement by it. This system, he says, does not value the worth of the individual human being, and indeed that is the essence of its tyranny. Conversely the post-Enlightenment democracies took rejection of torture as an element of their identity, as we saw in Washington’s orders, or as the first article of the German Grundgesetz, which states, “The dignity of the human being is inviolable. The respect and protection of that dignity is the obligation of all state power.” Leaving aside the differing concept of democracy in classical antiquity, do you not see a fundamental crisis of identity with a democratic state that adopts and uses torture?

Torture involves giving absolute power by one individual over another. Our founders knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely and that we shouldn’t even trust ourselves with absolute power. That is why they promoted limited government in politics, toleration of minorities in social life, and dignity in our relations with strangers. The history of slavery teaches us that this kind of power corrupts society, and history of torture shows how badly it damages states. Thomas Hobbes, whose national security credentials are impeccable, says it quite clearly in The Leviathan: “Accusations upon torture, are not to be reputed as testimonies” for what each prisoner confesses “tendeth to the ease of him that is tortured, not to the informing of the torturers.” People will say anything under torture to ease pain, says Hobbes, and this as far as he concerned, corrupted the judicial process and made all of us unsafe.

Torture may be compatible with democracy, but it is not compatible with liberalism, and we live in liberal democracies today. What I document in Torture and Democracy, is how modern liberal democratic states try to get around violating the dignity of others by becoming hypocrites. To this end, they use a lot of techniques that are physically painful, but don’t leave marks. A prisoner who doesn’t have marks is simply not credible when he makes the accusation of torture. So now they can say, “There was no torture see? So go home now.” Instead of embracing the ideals of dignity and freedom, states become cleverer in methods of oppression and deception. As John Locke said brilliantly in his Letter Concerning Toleration, a state that tortures is always a state of hypocrites. I also document how authoritarian states became cleaner in their torture as liberalism developed into a worldwide human rights movement after World War II. These dictators, especially our allies, realized their legitimacy and foreign aid, depended on being clean. Hypocrisy isn’t just a monopoly of democratic states.

The good news here is that liberal democratic leaders actually care enough about legitimacy that they fear clear outrages will cause people, the voters, to do something about it. If they didn’t, scarring tortures would still be common. So when we watch them, they get sneaky. Could things get worse? Sure. Locke believed that history was committed to liberalism’s triumph, but the question today is whether history will even tolerate liberalism surviving into the twenty second century. Everywhere, blind nationalism seems to threaten liberalism. Documenting clean torture in this respect is like the canary in the coal mine. As long as torture remains clean—and so far it has—it means that government leaders know that people are watching, and I find that hopeful.

3. In America today, the debate seems to focus on the efficacy of torture—whether it is a useful tool for getting at the truth. You note the flow from the Roman Ulpian, who accepts torture as something quite normal to be used in interrogation (though he does at some points express skepticism about its usefulness) to Cesare Beccaria, whose monumental denunciation of torture did so much to influence European ideas about torture and criminal justice in the eighteenth century. But today we seem stuck in a debate in which those who use torture are eager to try to justify themselves but unwilling to let a bright light shine into their conduct, ostensibly for national security reasons, though many will inevitably suspect that secrecy is driven by concerns for their own culpability. You offer up a very lengthy and nuanced discussion on the efficacy of torture, and in your Washington Post column on five myths you have pulled some chestnuts out of it. One of them is that “people will say anything under torture.” But isn’t the claim rather the way Shakespeare put it in act III of the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ that people will say what they think the torturer wants them to say? And doesn’t that explain why societies that put a premium on confessions like torture to extract them, and why al-Libi told the CIA about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD plans? Don’t you think that the efficacy discussion has to address the broader consequences that a decision to use torture has to reputation, and conversely to the ability of a terrorist foe to recruit?

Yes, I do. During the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Shah’s torture was the best recruiting tool the opposition had. Prisons were places where prisoners met each other and professionalized their skills, as I and others have documented. It feels like a nightmare watching American politicians make the same mistake as the Shah. I like to believe that with every mistake we must surely be learning, but sometimes it is hard to believe.

When I talked about people under torture saying anything, I was especially interested in the cases where torturers interrogate for true information. That’s what I document doesn’t work. But it seems pretty clear that torture works to generate false confessions, which serve equally as well as true confessions for many state purposes. When judges and juries value confessions as decisive proof, police are happy to generate confessions for convictions. This can happen in domestic crime, as it happened in Chicago in the 1980s where African Americans were sentenced to death on the basis of coerced confessions. They’re also good for international show trials, trials that exonerate the state’s failures. Stalin wanted show trials to demonstrate that terrorists and saboteurs caused his failures, and he wasn’t the last leader who liked show trials to vindicate his decisions. And lastly, states use false confessions as blackmail to turn prisoners into unwilling informants. Torture allows one to collect dependent and insular individuals, spreading a net of fear across a population. This can happen locally (as in a ghetto) or in a whole state, like East Germany.

It’s also true that torturers often hear what they want to hear. In fact that’s one of the big problems with torture that I document in the book and the “Five Myths” article. Even if torture could actually break a person and they told you the truth, the torturer has to recognize it was the truth, and too often that doesn’t happen because torturers come into a situation with their own assumptions and don’t believe the victim. Moreover, intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to deception. In police work, the crime is already known; all one wants is the confession. In intelligence, one must gather information about things that one does not know.

And let’s remember, torturers aren’t chosen for intelligence; they are chosen for devotion and loyalty, and they are terrible at spotting the truth when they see it. In the “Five Myths” piece I talk about how the Chilean secret service lost valuable information in that way when they broke Sheila Cassidy, an English doctor, and she told them everything but they didn’t believe her. And one can just repeat dozens of stories like this. My favorite is when Senator John McCain tried to explain the concept of Easter to his North Vietnamese torturer. “We believe there was a guy who walked the earth, did great things, was killed and three days later, he rose from the dead and went up to heaven.” His interrogator was puzzled and asked him to explain it again and again. He left, and when he came back, he was angry and threatened to beat him. Americans couldn’t possibly believe in “Easter” since no one lives again; McCain had to be making this up.

4. You talk about a “national security model” for torture and discuss in particular the way the French adopted torture to use in the Algerian war and how they reconciled this with a legal regime which condemned torture. I was most taken by the discussion of the judicial aspect. Allegations of torture, you report, were referred to a specific examining magistrate, Jacques Batigne, who served as a dead-letter office. You also point how the democratic process failed to engage this, in part because the leftist opposition was so badly discredited with its own Stalinist torture baggage. The analysis you present seems to me to closely parallel what Albert Camus writes in his diary, the ‘Chroniques algériennes,’ in which he dwells very heavily on torture and how it corrupted France’s democratic process. In America today, the Bush Administration seems to have developed its own repertoire of legal tricks. Judges refuse to consider torture cases by noting that immunity of public officials precludes them, or state secrets, or some combination of the two. And we recently saw Michael Mukasey tell us that because opinions had been given by the Office of Legal Counsel which declared torture techniques lawful, the use of those techniques could not be criminally investigated. It seems very close to the French approach. But assuming the political process produces a change to an anti-torture political leadership, what are the prospects for a democratic society going back and holding torturers to account? Have you given that any systematic study?

Stopping torture is actually the easiest part; the harder part is undoing the long-term damage. To stop torture, all one really needs is clear leadership that spells clear rules and punishes the slightest violations of the rules. It also protects whistleblowers, and requires regular and open medical inspection, not to mention fair and open trials for all prisoners. This was the way we stopped most torture in the US in the 1940s and 1950s after three or four decades of abysmal police torture in America, in cities both large and small.

Torture casts a very long shadow. When a state tortures, many decent professionals retire, leaving the police forces, the military and the intelligence services in disgust. So those who stayed behind create a culture of impunity. Torture also has a powerful deprofessionalizing ethic, damaging other intelligence efforts. Why do the hard work of using proper police and interrogation techniques when you’ve got a bat?. Considering that most recent whistleblowers have had to hide in fear, including the man who revealed the Abu Ghraib tortures, it will be difficult to recruit good people to do this work. How can you prevent waste or fraud, much less torture, if you are not going to protect whistleblowers? You can’t.

Americans think in the fantasy terms of Jack Bauer and ticking time bombs, while our hospitals fill with soldiers who clearly are suffering the traumatic side effects of being involved in torture, what is now called “perpetrator induced traumatic stress.” Americans seem less willing to acknowledge what our nation asked them to do than fund what is needed for their recovery. Fifty years after the Algerian War, the French have thousands of soldiers in therapy including their DOPS interrogators who are described as “spiritually wounded men, often ravaged by the weight of their guilt and shame.” We have yet to acknowledge that, much less the damage to victims and innocents we tortured.

A lot of people want trials, not just trials for those who did terrible things but also trials for those who had command responsibility and should have, and could have, prevented torture. And nothing predicts future torture quite like past impunity. But trials are an imperfect solution. They can deeply divide a society. The Argentine government tried the generals, but when it tried notorious junior officers responsible for torture, it faced a series of rebellions. And we certainly need to have a final open accounting of what was done, but truth commissions also have a mixed history, sometimes helping and other times promoting amnesia.

I would like to think that changing leaders will make a difference. But then remember, I lived through a revolution where the most important thing was to throw out the Shah and stop torture. The irony is that it didn’t stop. Changing leaders doesn’t automatically change torture. In fact, states usually change their interrogation practices after wars, not during them or when leaders change. This is what happened in Iran. People are too scared in wars and uncertain in crises, so they repeatedly reach for the same techniques that the people they opposed used.

But having said that, it is possible to change course in mid-war successfully. As I show in Torture and Democracy, the Battle of Algiers turned in favor of the French only after Paul Aussaresses, who ran the torture policy, was replaced by the very smart and canny Col. Yves Godard, and it was his informants, not Aussaresses’ torture policy, that gave the French the big breaks they needed. Goddard knew how intelligence really worked.

So it can be done. And whoever does it is going to have the backing of the American people. Every scientific national poll I’ve looked at since 9/11, for example, shows consistently anti-torture majorities in America. This number hasn’t varied, always hovering between 55 to 65% opposition, and includes both Republicans and Democrats. When pollsters ask not about “torture” in general but specific techniques like waterboarding, the opposition spikes to 80% opposed even if there is a ticking time bomb. What best predicts whether you’re for torture turns out not to be a partisan issue, though there is a slight Republican trend. What predicts whether you’re for torture best is if you approve of President Bush’s policies; basically it’s a loyalty vote. The protorture folk have always—and I mean always, in every poll I’ve seen—been a minority of 35-45% and I’m pretty sure the number is shrinking as the President’s approval numbers dip.

So the good news is that opponents of torture are not alone. I suspect people think the majority of Americans are for torture, but this just isn’t supported by any of the polling. It’s just hype from partisan media, talking heads, and the politicians. The real truth is that there is intelligence out there. What it requires is for government to tap into it and start using it.

5. In the United States, the debate seems to be increasingly focused on waterboarding, which I suspect you’ll agree doesn’t really present any serious questions on the definitional front. Obviously it is torture. But there are other techniques which are much more problematic. One is the sensory-deprivation/sensory-overload technique associated with Kubark. Waterboarding has not been used frequently, at least according to General Hayden, but the sensory-deprivation technique seems to have developed into something close to standard operating procedure, and was even used on a U.S. citizen, Jose Padilla. A psychologist who evaluated him says he was essentially destroyed as a self-actuated human being, capable of independent thought and direction. Is the Bush Administration accomplishing a sort of victory by keeping the debate focused on waterboarding while avoiding discussion of the techniques more commonly employed?

Yes, that’s right. The historical record is clear. Waterboarding is torture, and yes focusing on just waterboarding is a distraction. Waterboarding is serious, but only the tip of the iceberg. There have only been three documented cases of waterboarding, but the CIA has subjected at least 30 others to “enhanced interrogation” as Director Hayden says, so there are other kinds of techniques as well. And there are unaccounted prisoners last seen in US custody as well as secret prisons out there where these things continue to happen.

One day we’ll know more, but the historical record now shows that American interrogators and soldiers, whether authorized or not, have used forced standing, forced kneeling, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, beatings on the soles of the feet, sexual humiliation, and psychological coercion, as well as some cases, electrotorture. So it would be a mistake then to confuse the forest from the three tallest trees in it. Waterboarding highlights the huge dangers of torture, but it is only the beginning of political literacy not the end of it.

And the same applies to domestic policing. I’m less worried about our police learning how to waterboard criminals than I am with the use of stun guns and tasers. Any inspector would wonder what straps and a bucket of water would be doing in an interrogation room, and investigate for torture. But they can’t prohibit police from using stun guns and tasers, which have authorized police uses, and it is very hard for them to tell when these devices have been used illegally to torture, as they leave few marks.

Lastly, I think we need to understand that torture just doesn’t hide in a vault in the CIA. It hides in all the dark pockets of society—military barracks, schools, frat houses, our supermax prisons and immigration lockups. When torture happens, the top authorizes, and the people at the bottom come running with the techniques. Vigilance has to extend far beyond our intelligence agencies to all these other areas.

Most dangerously, I think we need to pay attention to our new culture of irresponsibility. We live now in an age where something is or is not torture depending on when and who it is done to. Zapping an angry businessman on an airplane cabin will be called torture, but zapping a foreigner might just be good security and completely excusable. This is bad. All my students at Reed have good intentions, but they don’t all deserve A’s because what they do matters regardless of their intention. Yet police and intelligence officers, not to mention politicians, want to get As just because they had good intentions. They want to be exonerated for having done no torture at all; it’s only torture if they had bad intentions. And that is very dangerous and irresponsible because judging people solely on their intentions, as William Blake said, is the road to hell.

6. This week Congress will again take up the intelligence bill, and the proposal to clarify that the ban on torture accepted by the uniformed services is applicable to all U.S. actors, including the intelligence community. Of course, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 already says that, but the Bush Administration has apparently developed its own secret understanding to the contrary. Part of the argument that has been made in favor of this measure is that the idea of compartmentalization or limitation of torture doesn’t work, that once it is known that certain techniques are being used they spread, or “migrate” in the language of the Army’s Faye-Jones Report. You seem to chart the same sort of migration many times in your study. Are the proponents of the torture ban correct on this?

Yes, torture does migrate, and there are some good examples of it both in American and French history. The basic idea here is that soldiers who get ahead torturing come back and take jobs as policemen, and private security, and they get ahead doing the same things they did in the army. And so torture comes home. Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century. During the Philippine Insurgency in 1902, soldiers learned the old Spanish technique of using water tortures, and soon these same techniques appeared in police stations, especially throughout the South, as well as in military lockups during World War I. Likewise, the electrical techniques used in Vietnam appeared in the 1960s appeared in torturing African Americans on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as I argue in the book, that wasn’t just an accident.

So torture always comes home. And the techniques of this war are likely to show up in a neighborhood near you. Likewise, the techniques that appeared in the War on Terror were already documented in INS lockups in Miami in the 1990s. There is no bright line between domestic and foreign torture; the stuff circulates.

Yes, I am opposed to two track systems, where one group of people can torture and the other people can’t. And it is not hard to understand why. Suppose you’re an interrogator who is not allowed to use some technique, but the guy from the Other Governmental Agency can. What is more, you believe that these techniques work. So why should you be stuck using techniques that are slow and time consuming, when the guy from the OGA can get good results and win all the glory? Aren’t you just an idiot for sticking to the rules? Of course not, and so torture will spread, and that slippery slope is a lot slicker in counterinsurgency conflicts than in domestic policing, as I show in the book.

There are good reasons to believe that whatever these “enhanced techniques are” they will seep into other agencies and organizations. And since many of these techniques leave no marks, it will be impossible to prove that they were even used. We saw this pattern in Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers reported having learned their interrogation techniques by imitating CIA field officers.

So I think it is only a matter of time now before new rot sets into the US military thanks to the two track system our government has endorsed. This is inevitable when you codify two track interrogation systems into law. In the 1970s, the Brazilian military had a similar system, and the state had to turn on and kill its torturers in order to preserve itself. As the Brazilian journalist Elio Gaspari observed at the time, “Unless everyone in the army participates in torture, you very quickly develop two kinds of soldiers.” He call them “the combatants,” who fight the terrorists with torture, and the “bureaucrats,” who are committed to preserving the military’s everyday functioning and discipline. In Brazil, the day came when the combatant-torturers refused to accept the orders of the bureaucrats and regarded with contempt their peers who were committed to army disciplines. The generals reluctantly concluded that the “torturers were going to have to be isolated, marginalized, and eliminated, so as to save the Army.”

You can obtain a copy of ‘Torture and Democracy’ at your local bookstore or by placing an on-line order here.

Entry Filed under: Interrogation, Iran, Law, Psychological Torture, Torture, War Crimes