Wednesday, June 4, 2008

“When democracies torture"

AMY GOODMAN: Now, these latest revelations, what is your response, Professor Rejali?

DARIUS REJALI: Well, I mean, they fall under the doctrine of command responsibility; that is to say, moral culpability lies with people who know that something is happening or should have known that something is happening under their command and had the power to stop it. So, typically under war crimes trials and things of this sort, this doctrine has been evoked quite a bit. So, first of all, on the moral side, that's the issue.

Actually, the interesting thing for me on the political side is that it doesn't fit any of the two models we thought were happening in the White House. One of the models was that there was this kind of—this is a more conservative argument—a slippery slope: people sent mixed messages, and then people went on to torture. And then, the other model is the Mafia model, the wink-wink, nod-nod model: just get it done, I don't care how. It turns out, actually, that there were not only demonstrations, but also that the policymakers that were key to this wanted a legal cover. And so, they cared enough about the rule of law—this is the silver lining, if you want—that they actually went to lawyers and had them write a cover, which means that sort of on the—this is sort of central to the thesis of Torture and Democracy—when democracies torture, they always try and do it under the cover of law, and they try and do it in such a way that appears that no torture is actually happening, leaving torture techniques that leave no marks and things that really make it difficult for victims to come forward credibly.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that difference—it's just an odd phrase to say "when democracies torture"—but the difference between torture in democracies and not democracies.

DARIUS REJALI: Yeah. Most people think that, well, logically, democracies are unlikely to torture, because they're bargains of leniency—people don't like to be tortured, they elect their rulers, rulers don't torture them—whereas in authoritarian states, they can torture them as much as they want, because the people don't control power.

In fact, it's a little different than that. Authoritarian states indeed use scarring techniques, techniques—they don't particularly care if they leave bloody marks or if journalists report or other sorts of things, because they can stop them. In democracies where there's a minimal civil society, where people watch their government, whether they're church groups or whether they're newspaper organizations or human rights organizations, then whether it's your local government, your local police or your national government, they try to use cleaner techniques. And by this, I mean techniques that leave very few marks. I mean, the list of techniques that you read earlier—sleep deprivation, various forms of stress positions, waterboarding—these are all techniques that are actually kind of rare in human history up until the nineteenth century, where we find them appearing first in democracies and then spreading—

AMY GOODMAN: Like where?

DARIUS REJALI: Well, waterboarding—well, let's say electrotorture, the most famous of these, is—first appears in the United States in the 1908. Emma Goldman was—documented the very first electrotorture device in American prisons, the famous anarchist writer. 1908, she documented something called the "humming bird," which was a device that probably hummed with electricity, which was used in New York prisons. So it's very, very early on that we start using these things.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, in terms of torture, you go back to slavery.

DARIUS REJALI: Yes, certainly slavery existed. What's really interesting about slavery is that there were two types of techniques in—among slavers. There were techniques that left marks. Most people think that slavery is about whipping and those things. That mostly pertained to owners. But dealers, to sell slaves, had to leave no marks on their slaves, because that would affect the price. So what we find—what's very interesting is that the techniques that slave dealers were using start becoming much more common, and the police start adopting them in the United States starting in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. And they become common interrogation techniques in the '20s and '30s.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happens to a society that has engaged in torture?

DARIUS REJALI: Yeah. There's always blowback. There's always blowback. One of the things that definitely happens is that, particularly if the torture happens in a foreign war, is that the soldiers come back, and those who have been involved in torture get involved in usually security activities, policing or private security. And what then happens is that they use the same techniques to get ahead that they did in the war.

Torture has a twenty-year shadow, it appears. That is to say, the reason we all know waterboarding, for example, isn't because we had waterboarding from the early days; it's because the soldiers who came back from the Philippine insurgency war in 1902 all brought it back to the United States, and then this technique started appearing all over the United States, particularly in the South and against conscientious objectors during the World War I.

So—and the same thing happened in Chicago. We have—one of the biggest torture crises of recently years was the torture crisis in Chicago, which involved hundreds of victims and including people who were forced to confess and were condemned to death row. And—

AMY GOODMAN: You're talking about the police commander, Jon Burge—

DARIUS REJALI: Jon Burge

AMY GOODMAN: —and the prisoners forced to so-called confess, end up being taken off of death row now, and say that they were tortured—

DARIUS REJALI: That is correct.

AMY GOODMAN: —and now the documentation is there.

DARIUS REJALI: There are many other cases that will soon probably come into that whole discussion. The main point is that the torture techniques that were used by police in those circumstances were torture techniques that were first documented in southern Vietnam during the Vietnam War. So somebody brought these back. And so, I mean, the thing is that the torture techniques in this war are likely to appear in a neighborhood near you sometime in the next twenty years, and that's one of the most serious blowbacks of this.

~ From: Torture and Democracy, Part II: Scholar Darius Rejali Details the History and Scope of Modern Torture ~

 

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