Torture is brutal and ineffective, so says a United States Senate Committee. This is a painful pronouncement for the US administration as well as the dozens of countries that, in the wake of 9/11, have been complicit in the extraordinary rendition and torture of countless men, women and children. Yet this controversial statement is hardly news. 18th Century commentators such as Cesare Beccaria argued that using pain to find truth was a ‘sure route for the acquittal of robust ruffians and the conviction of weak innocents’. Torture leads to ‘fabricated information’. This fact— alongside humanitarian arguments—is why its use diminished within modern criminal justice systems.
9/11. On this date, in 1973, the Pinochet regime began a 17-year dictatorship defined by brutality; the Valech Report counts almost 40,000 victims of torture. Several years ago, I interviewed survivors. They recounted how their torture had nothing to do with information-gathering. They had been beaten, raped, electrocuted, whipped, hung, subject to sensory deprivation or psychologically damaged for other reasons. Torture was used to punish, to terminate political resistance and to assert state power. Rosa, a student, was tortured in the regime’s first year. What puzzled her most was that “they knew everything about me…they just wanted to see if I would say it”. Her life was devastated by nothing more than a point-scoring game by security officials. Who would risk a repeat performance? Sending tortured individuals back into communities allows others to see their broken souls and blank eyes. This might inflame opposition, but it dampens spirits when opponents realise that the state will rule by any means.
This week’s revelations illustrate that US intelligence agencies, heady from the indulgences of an ever-expanding ‘war’, built their empires on fallacies. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who led the investigation, was warned that the disclosures would place US operations and lives at risk. This may be so. Yet, this is also based on the assumption that those targeted for torture, their communities and societies have not known the truth. In reality, we already know that torture is brutal, that it distorts speech, that it involves multiple layers of organisation in secret operations, and that it is rarely punished.
Our knowledge however remains skewed. Media reporting focuses on the torturers, their institutional networks, and the euphemistic names we give to humiliating, deadly practices in the name of democracy. In our outrage, we signify with the perpetrators. Most victims are missing. We might never even have believed their stories without the Senate Committee reports. Somehow, simply being detained in such circumstances makes us torturable.
Last Sunday saw another torture story. Six men were released from Guantanamo Bay to Uruguay. One is Abu Wa’el Dhiab, a business owner who fled Kabul to Pakistan with his family after 9/11. Detained by Pakistani police, following a frequent street sweep, he was passed over to US operations. From there, he was rendered to Guantanamo Bay where he spent 12 years, detained without charge. Drawing upon one of his few available resistance strategies, he went on hunger strike. Cori Crider, his legal representative, stated that ‘for most of the past two years, Mr Dhiab has had a team of US soldiers truss him up like an animal, haul him to a restraint chair, and force-feed him through a tube in his nose’. Cleared for release five years ago, his removal from Cuba was undertaken in secrecy.
The Senate report acknowledges the uselessness of torture in protecting us from terrorist or criminal attacks. The lies and the harms that emerge make our situations worse. Yet the exposure of this useful reminder is limited. We do little to consider ongoing torture in correctional and security establishments, or those who are victimised. In the midst of the angst and disquiet, a silencing remains.