Why have modern democracies been such important innovators of torture?
Americans were shocked at the photographs of tortured Iraqi prisoners incarcerated at Abu Ghraib. They were horrified by the assault on Abner Louima, the Haitian immigrant molested with the broken end of a broomstick by New York City police officers in August 1997. A decade earlier, they were horrified by revelations that New York police officers had used stun guns to coerce confessions from young Hispanic and African-American suspects in 1985 and 1986.
Our outrage is predictable because we reject the idea that democracies engage in torture. That’s something authoritarian states do — in the words of a World War II poster, “the method of the enemy.” But torture has been documented in many modern democracies, not just our own.
So why is torture still occurring in democracies? Just bad people in power? Sadists in the police? Human nature? Think again: Whenever we ask ourselves why something is still happening, it’s a sign that something’s wrong with the way we understand our past.
It is tempting to think of democracies as inherently less likely to torture than authoritarian states are. After all, the people elect democratic governments, and the people don’t want to be tortured themselves. Even if we view democracy cynically, as a game in which elites take turns running things, we believe that it has a quiet gentleman’s agreement — we don’t torture you when we are in power, you don’t torture us, and we’ll keep it all tidy. However you cut it, we think that democracies are bargains in leniency, and that until recently they had little to do with torture.
But that view is incorrect as a matter of historical record. Indeed, democracies often set the pace in torture innovation. Legalized torture was a standard part of Greek and Roman republics, our ancient models of democracy. Roman judges used various tortures, most famously the short whips, ferula and scutica, to coerce confessions and get information. Torture was also a standard part of Italian republics like Venice and Florence, our other historical models of democracy. Those city-states adopted some of the same techniques as the inquisitors of the Roman Catholic Church. They often used the strappado, a technique in which guards tied a victim’s hands behind his back, hoisted him from the ground by means of a hook and pulley, and repeatedly dropped him to the floor. The political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli was subjected to that process thrice. Before World War II, the British, the Americans, and the French all practiced torture: the French in Vietnam, the British in their mandate of Palestine, the Americans in the Philippines, not to mention what our police were doing in cities large and small. Police in democratic states used electrotorture, water torture, painful stress positions, drugs, and beatings. They did so sometimes on their own, sometimes in collusion with local citizens, and sometimes with the quiet approval, if not explicit authorization, of their governments. All this before the Central Intelligence Agency ever existed.
Our memory, however, usually starts with World War II. Torture was something done by the Nazis and then the Stalinists. The good news is that we made sincere and often effective efforts to prevent torture at home and to encourage human rights abroad — the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations in 1948. The bad news is that we came to believe that no one on our side was ever a torturer. Never had been. Being a winner was all about being morally pure.
By torture I mean the systematic infliction of physical torment on detained, helpless individuals by state officials for police purposes: that is, for confession, information, or intimidation. No doubt one could slice torture in other ways, but whatever you want to call these practices, they have a long history in the world’s democracies.
Let me be clear: The democratic record of torture is not as bad as that of authoritarian states. Nevertheless, from a scholar’s perspective, the relation of torture to democracy requires an explanation. The question is not, Is torture compatible with democracy? Obviously it has been for some time. The questions are: Under what circumstances is torture compatible with democracy? Why were democracies such powerful innovators of torture?
This isn’t just an academic exercise. Torture represents a powerful danger to democracies: It creates conditions in which one human being gains absolute power over another, and democrats know that no society can tolerate giving anyone that power, legally or tacitly, without setting loose corruption. Torture destroys the lives of victims and torturers alike, and it sets into motion powerful corrupting forces that destroy the judicial, intelligence, and military institutions that use it. Entire organizations can operate as a state within a state, unaccountable to democratic oversight. When that happens, the slide to authoritarianism is almost inevitable.
But a people that can speak intelligently about cruelty can take steps to protect itself against tyranny. The first step is to recognize that torture has a demand side and a supply side. Consider the demand side first. What circumstances prompt the demand for torture in democracies? National emergencies are probably your first thought. It is easy to imagine that, in war or in the face of terrorism, an imminent threat might lead some people to endorse torture and many others to turn a blind eye. Numerous famous cases fit that pattern. The French turned to torture in a bitter war with Algerian nationalists in the 1950s; the British as they fought to retain control of Northern Ireland in the 1970s. And the Israelis turned to torture in their conflict with Palestinian organizations in the 1970s.
But there are many cases of persistent torture in democracies that don’t fit the national-security model, because they occur in the absence of an objective or perceived national threat. Sometimes torture is a local arrangement, usually between the police and businessmen or property holders. The latter two want safer streets, so they don’t look too closely at what the police do. Between 1973 and 1991, for example, the Chicago police used torture to extract confessions in high-publicity cases, like when they were hunting for the killer of a policeman. Police techniques included electrotorture, asphyxiation, suspension, and beating. Indeed, in 2006 two special prosecutors, who had spent millions on a report into the activities of the Chicago police, identified the torture of African-Americans, some of whom had confessed and been sentenced to be executed. Most alleged incidents implicated Commander Jon Burge, a decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, and the detectives he supervised.
Another factor that triggers torture is a permissive judicial system. In the 1980s, for example, investigators for the Japanese Federation Bar Associations uncovered numerous cases of torture in Japan, in which police coerced confessions by beating suspects, punching them in the stomach, banging their heads against tables, and slapping them in the face. Many of the Japanese suspects had been accused of ordinary crimes and not held in emergency conditions. But wherever police have the power to detain suspects for long periods without justifying incarceration before a judge, torture will soon follow. And it is especially likely in a judicial system in which judges and juries value confessions. (In the Japanese case, human-rights investigators found that 86 percent of all convictions were based on confessions.)
Decommissioned soldiers can carry torture techniques to civilian jobs as policemen, just as police practices can find their way into military interrogation. That kind of transfer happened twice in American history in the last century. After the Philippine insurgency that followed the Spanish-American War, in the early 20th century, torture techniques used in the islands appeared in police stations throughout the United States, especially in the South, as well as in military prisons for conscientious objectors during World War I. Techniques that first appeared in the hands of soldiers in Vietnam later appeared in the hands of Chicago police. The world is a messy place, and the demands for torture can overlap.
Thus there is nothing special about American history. Torture occurs in old democracies and new, in New York in the 1920s and Johannesburg and São Paulo in the 1990s. The techniques of the current “war on terror” may yet appear in a neighborhood near you in the next 20 years. (As near as I can tell, such transference casts a 20-year shadow.)
While the factors I have described are not always sufficient to lead to torture in democracies, they also are not factors that democracies can do without — so democracies are always potentially vulnerable to torture. It would be difficult to imagine modern democracies without juries of the people. Nor could modern democracies function without bureaucracies to run elections and put laws into effect, and defend them against external threats. But relying on the judgment of ordinary citizens for justice has its dangers. Psychologists tell us that juries believe confessions, even when they know the confessions have been coerced. And bureaucracies are closed organizations of experts: When experts decide that legislatures don’t have sufficient will or expertise to do the right thing during a political emergency, they may turn to torture.
Similarly, for various reasons, modern democracies give more weight to property holders, and not just because such states have free-market economies. A traditional argument heard in democracies is that homeowners care more about their neighborhood than renters and homeless people do. If the police use torture to protect them, the good citizens often don’t want to hear about it. Indeed, in two trials in the 1980s, the citizens of Chicago failed to convict police officers accused of using torture.
All that tells us why the state, the judge, or the citizen may demand torture, but it doesn’t explain what kind of techniques democracies use — call it the supply side of torture. I want to connect that to the second question I asked early in this essay: Why have modern democracies been such important innovators of torture?
We often think that the technique a torturer reaches for has something to do with his or her abnormal psychology. But most torturers are not sadomasochists — organizations try to weed out abnormal individuals who are likely to be disciplinary problems. What is crucial to understand is that most torturers have styles, and they pass those on to the next generation, just like tailors and massage therapists do. Torture is a craft, and, like all craftsmen who work with bodies, torturers are creatures of habit. They combine tortures in predictable ways, and every combination, every style, has a history.
Twelve years ago, I started the difficult project of mapping how torture technology spread around the globe over the course of the last 200 years. I mapped each technique as it changed over the decades, noting who used it, when, how it spread, and its effects. To be sure, it was unpleasant to map how leg clamps and other pressing devices used to squeeze muscles until bones broke appeared in Gestapo interrogations in the early 1940s, then spread in a broad arc from northern France, through Belgium, Holland, and northern Germany to Denmark and Norway, but didn’t appear elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe. Tracking that kind of trajectory is slow work, but the truth is that social scientists know more about how hybrid corn spreads in Iowa than about how torture techniques spread.
Tracking torture over 200 years yields a surprising conclusion: With some exceptions, very few modern techniques originated with the Nazis, the Stalinists, or the Inquisition. The pattern is weird and unexpected. What has driven torture technology turns out to be something that no one usually considers having anything to do with torture — namely, international monitoring and democracy.
Mapping torture techniques, one can immediately distinguish two kinds of intensely painful physical tortures: those that leave marks and those that do not. All the evidence suggests that the more-scarring techniques started to disappear over the course of the 20th century, as human-rights monitoring increased. Leg clamps, for example, are virtually unknown today.
On the other hand, “clean techniques” are spreading. Of those, the main styles are what I call French Modern and Anglo-Saxon Modern. French Modern is the classic combination of electricity and water; used properly, it leaves few marks. It appeared in French colonies in 1931 and spread across the world. (The Nazis picked it up from the Vichy police.)
Anglo-Saxon Modern is older, a combination of sleep deprivation, exhaustion exercises, and forced standing and other positional tortures, sometimes called “stress and duress” techniques. It has varied origins — some techniques came out of old (illegal) British and French military punishments, others from American police and prison practices, and yet others from the global slave trade. Most of the techniques used by American forces today, either at Abu Ghraib or elsewhere in Afghanistan or Iraq are part of this tradition.
These are painful forms of torture. Sleep deprivation isn’t simply depriving Taliban of their naps. It reduces people’s ability to tolerate musculoskeletal pain. It causes deep aches first in the legs and then in the upper body. Animal tests suggest that it makes people more sensitive to pain caused by heat, electricity, and punches. That makes it ideal as a supplement to other painful techniques. Clean torture is not simply a psychological tool, just because it does not leave marks. The history of modern torture tells us one more important point: Whenever we watch, torturers become sneaky. When the news media, the public, or politicians monitor what police are doing during interrogations, the interrogators literally pull their punches.
That makes clean techniques valuable: Allegations of torture are simply less credible when there is nothing to show. In the absence of visible wounds or photographs of actual torture, who is one to believe? Clean torture breaks down the ability to communicate between the victim and the wider community. Stealth tortures are unlike other tortures because they are calculated to subvert that relationship. And frankly, people judge more by what they see than by what they only hear about. Would Americans have been so outraged by Abu Ghraib without the pictures? In fact, the army released information to the news media and public about the abuses before the famous pictures became available, but the public barely took notice.
That is why clean coercive techniques typically show up in democratic states, where inquisitive reporters, active church groups, and human-rights organizations tend to exist in large numbers. And that is also why, as global human-rights monitoring developed in the 1960s, authoritarian states learned to use cleaner techniques.
Electrotorture, for example, was relatively unknown for much of the 20th century, and when it appeared, it was used first by democracies, especially in the United States between 1900 and 1930 and by France in Vietnam in the 1930s. It did not start spreading country to country until the 60s. The contagion effect was staggering after that, with the number of countries using electrotorture doubling almost every decade. The surge began in Latin America and soon spread to the Middle East and Asia, as prisoner reports indicate. In the 1980s, electrotorture reached Africa, and in the 1990s, Southern and, especially, Eastern Europe.
As the shift to clean styles reveals, torturers do pay attention to human-rights monitoring. If they did not, the shift to clean styles would be inexplicable. As would a few other things. Why, for example, do torturers often single out and kill doctors today? Maybe hunting doctors makes better sport than hunting lawyers, but it is more likely that those engaging in torture care about medical monitoring. Since the 1970s, doctors have been on the front line of deciphering how clean techniques work. And so doctors are a threat.
Some people wonder whether participating in a church antitorture letter-writing campaign or writing out a check to Amnesty International matters. The truth is, if there is a prospect of a world without torture, either clean or scarring, it lies ultimately with public monitoring of the sort those organizations do. Remember that whipping remained legal in Delaware and Maryland until the 1960s. If there were no human-rights monitors, no Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, or local churches, we would be living in a world where whipping, leg clamps, and other Nazi techniques would probably be coming back.
The key point is that human-rights monitoring does work, although not always the way we think. Sometimes it leads to the end of torture, as it did with public whipping. But when governments, knowingly or not, create a demand for torture, monitoring can drive torturers to be cleaner. That is why political literacy in torture matters. If external monitoring can do only so much, then clear leadership, internal monitoring, sharp punishments for rule breakers, and better protection for whistle-blowers can end most organized torture. But Americans need the will to look for what they cannot see, and to break their silence about it.
If they do not, they will have to deal with the dangerous long-term effects of institutionalized torture on a society: less-professional intelligence gathering, fragmented bureaucratic structures, and the many traumatized soldiers who have, whether they can acknowledge it or not, participated in torture. Veterans’ hospitals will increasingly have to deal with soldiers diagnosed with perpetrator-induced traumatic stress — as will local police departments, which, as we’ve seen, often hire ex-soldiers. As today’s debates about waterboarding and the like make clear, torture can deeply divide a society. It is past time for Americans to start building a democracy without torture.
Darius Rejali is a professor of political science at Reed College. His latest books are Torture and Democracy, recently published by Princeton University Press, and Approaches to Violence, forthcoming this year from Princeton.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 54, Issue 20, Page B7
