Waterboarding. Hypothermia. Stress positions. Prolonged isolation. Sensory deprivation. These “clean” tortures leave deep psychological wounds but few physical scars — and they have been used for decades not only by dictatorships, but by democratic governments, including the United States.
After 9/11, Americans used these techniques on so-called “enemy combatants” detained in a system of prisons from Iraq’s notorious Abu Ghraib and the Pentagon's detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to numerous CIA black sites. And according to recent reports, officials at the highest levels of the Bush Administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, approved the use of “harsh interrogation techniques” in questioning detainees.
In his massive study, “Torture and Democracy” (Princeton, 2007) internationally renowned violence and torture expert Dr. Darius Rejali writes that these “clean” interrogation methods not only violate international law, but they radicalize enemies, undermine credibility, and yield unreliable intelligence. They do not strengthen national security, but instead make us less safe.
In his acclaimed book, Rejali sets forth an encyclopedic history of torture methods as well as a social science analysis and an argument against torture. Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, called the book a “superb genealogy of modern torture.” Roth added: “Rejali's indictment derives its power from thoughtful analysis and deep historical grounding. It is the best book on the subject that I have encountered. No one should debate the merits of torture without having read it.”
Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College, in Portland, Oregon. He is also Iranian-American, and his first book focused on Iran: “Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern Iran.” In his forthcoming book, “Approaches to Violence” (Princeton, 2008), Rejali provides a manual for citizens to use in addressing issues of violence.
To balance the demands of his dark studies, Rejali writes poetry, plays music, travels extensively, and surfs.
Robin Lindley: You urge that knowledge is power, and write that people need to know about cruelty to resist tyranny.
Darius Rejali: Ignorance is a serious problem. When there’s a lot of violence, and people are afraid of talking and ignorant of what’s happening, then they’re not capable of resisting political actions against them.
It’s important to empower people, to give them the vocabulary to talk about violence. There’s a lot you can do about violence, but if you can’t talk about it intelligently, and if all it becomes is movies and (the television show) “24,” you rapidly become gullible, a fool and easily manipulated, and that’s a real problem.
R.L.: How did you come to trace the history of torture in democracies?
D.R.: I decided [in the mid-1990s] to do a small study on electro-torture and asked when it started, who used it, how it spread. It seemed to come repeatedly out of democracies. At the same time, I saw the world of tasers and stun guns emerging — forms of violence now that people can’t see and are immune to third-party monitoring. I needed to dig into this more.
The most important thing was to separate out the myths — the myths that these tortures never happened and that democracies never torture. I realized that the key factor was public monitoring: wherever you have a high degree of public monitoring, the cleaner the torture will be with less to show the press, to show lawyers.
R.L.: Your book is encyclopedic in scope.
D.R.: But it’s also an argument about the 20th century and how we should remember it as it pertains to torture without the hypocrisy. It’s actually remorseless toward everybody. There’s not a single country or a single privileged group that doesn’t get its contribution to torture — whether it’s Canada, which no one would think of having to do with torture, but I talk about its moments of torture. Nobody is morally pure. Once you think you’re morally pure, you forget your own history.
R.L.: And you recount U.S. torture methods: techniques that did not leave marks on slaves, and waterboarding in the Philippine insurrection of the early 1900s.
D.R.: Not to mention the long history of torture from 1910-1940 domestically in cities and towns, and the violence against African-Americans in the south in the ’50s. There’s a whole history we don’t remember because we like the happy history that we never tortured.
Anyone who has any exposure to policing or military life knows that social conditions drive ordinary people to violence. It doesn’t matter what your DNA coding is.
R.L.: You describe the abuse of prisoners with electricity by Seattle police in the 1920s.
D.R.: In Seattle from about 1922 to 1925 there was a cell in the downtown prison with an electrified mat. The [prisoners were] forced to walk on it, then the electricity would be turned on, and the prisoners would hop and skip and sparks would fly until they confessed. The great thing about that was that electricity didn’t leave marks.
And that was one of several cases. In Dallas, they attached prisoners to a battery. In Arkansas, they had a portable electric chair in a sheriff’s office that didn’t kill but shocked during interrogations. The oldest is “the hummingbird,” used in 1908 in prisons in New York, as documented by the anarchist and writer Emma Goldman. It was probably an electrical device that hummed with current like an early cattle prod and was the first electric torture device used on helpless individuals by state officials for the purpose of intimidation.
Most forget that America is where electro-torture began — not Nazi Germany. The police wanted to avoid bad publicity, so they used these [devices]. It’s similar to [the use of] stun guns and tasers today in conditions that are hard to document.
R.L.: I didn’t know that the LAPD used a taser as they beat Rodney King in 1991.
D.R.: Even as the video was running [during the police beating], he was in pain from electricity. Officer Stacey Koon fired the taser twice before the video started. Each taser dart as it goes into [a person] delivers about 50,000 volts. King was so big it didn’t work, but he had those [darts] in him when they beat him. And Koon said he drained the taser while the video was running.
So King was electro-tortured. The beating, which everyone could see, so outraged people it led to riots in Los Angeles, but nobody saw the electric torture, so nobody could react to it. If he had just been subjected to electrical pain, would anybody have said anything? The guess is probably not.
And that’s what I mean by political literacy. Every one of these things need a history and a name, and people need to become more familiar with the modern ways of doing violence. If you don’t know what it is, you’re a victim of it sooner or later.
R.L.: In your view, all of the casualties of the Iraq war — American and Iraqi — can be traced to torture.
D.R.: All of the failures in Iraq are predictable outcomes of not paying attention to how torture works.
I note the interrogation of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, an al Qaeda operative who was in charge of one the camps in Afghanistan. At first he cooperated with the FBI interrogators. Then the CIA grabbed him.
Al-Libi said Saddam Hussein was training al Qaeda on weapons of mass destruction, which went directly into the president’s speech in 2002, and was a large part of the justification that [Secretary of State Colin] Powell gave at the United Nations for going to war with Iraq.
Later, it turned out al-Libi was tortured. He retracted his statements and said they were all lies. And of course we know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and the Pentagon just concluded that there was no al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection. So basically what took us to war was torture.
If people want good intelligence, torture is not the way to get it. Yet this administration insists on using “harsh interrogation techniques,” and Bush recently vetoed the bill to prevent the CIA from using these techniques.
They say these techniques save lives, but whatever that number of lives saved is, it better be a lot larger than the lives it’s taken. The reality is that in every case where this is said and social scientists later opened the archives, it’s a disaster.
It was recently reported that the highest administration officials — including Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Ashcroft — discussed torture while insulating Bush from the meetings.
R.L.: It sounds like these guys cared enough about the rule of law that they had to make this look and sound legal with the president’s Office of Legal Counsel to okay this.
D.R.: To me, that’s interesting because they knew they were doing something that could potentially damage the office of the presidency forever, and they had to fit [this plan into] the rule of law because otherwise people would think of them as complete savages. And to me, that’s positive. You’re not dealing with mafia types. But it’s distressing that lawyers are easily manipulated and that the Office of Legal Counsel was no longer [giving] directive advice based on fidelity to the Constitution and the law, but basically saw the president as their own client and wanted to [free] him of any legal implications. These civilian lawyers are completely unrepentant. The only people who had an understanding were the military lawyers, who all got it, and resigned en masse.
R.L.: You’ve said that most of the decent people of the FBI, the CIA, and the military have left government service.
D.R.: It seems that good people who are professionals and know policing have retired. Once they retire, former CIA and FBI people are clear that there are two cultures: the culture of the professionals and the culture of those who participated in torture in the past five or six years. It’s clear the professionals lost the battle and were forced out.
Torture creates a profoundly unprofessional atmosphere. Whenever you authorize someone to torture, they feel they have carte blanche to do whatever they want. They don’t want to be monitored. Each operation spins out of control of central authority. In political science it’s called “bureaucratic devolution” where the bureaucracy fragments and each part goes off with rogue operations.
The kinds of things that work in good counterterrorism policy aren’t being done, and it will take a long time to rebuild the intelligence agencies to a point that all of us can feel safe. Presumably, all of us want good counterterrorism policy, but you don’t get there with torture.
And Congress shares responsibility in these issues too. The Military Commissions Act eliminates habeas corpus and narrowly defines torture.
The biggest problem for me is that the Act sets up parallel systems: the military can’t torture but the CIA can. The problem with parallel tracks is that sooner or later somebody who can’t torture asks, “Why am I using grade B practices when those other guys get all the glory by using grade A practices?” In time, torture seeps across that line because ordinary soldiers ask, “Why should I do just crap stuff when the CIA gets to do good stuff?” The good stuff doesn’t work, but it doesn’t matter because the administration has given torture an appeal that it saves lives, and the corruption seeps across lines and leads to de-professionalization in the military and loss of control.
R.L.: Despite your study of some very dark places for the past decade, you seem optimistic about reducing the use of torture despite what you’ve seen historically.
D.R.: Yes, I am optimistic. As I point out in the book, human rights monitoring really does work and affects the behavior of torturers. Some people may think that their check to Amnesty International or a church group or a local cop watch doesn’t work, but actually historical evidence is clear that these groups have an effect. The key to a world without torture domestically and internationally is a combination of internal and external monitoring.
There’s a myth that the U.S. is pro-torture, but in fact it’s not. Since 9/11, all the ticking time bomb scenarios and “24” haven’t shifted public opinion. It’s almost the same as before 9/11 with most people opposed to torture. And the more specific [the study] on torture, the more the negatives go up. I worry about professions like lawyers and intelligence officers, but American society still has its moral universe intact. Depending on the question asked, between 60 and 65 percent of American oppose torture. And the people who support torture tracks with the approval rating of President Bush.
