I was disturbed to read yesterday the Pew Charitable Trust poll revealing that 54% of Americans who regularly attend church services say the use of torture against suspected terrorists is "often" or "sometimes" justified. (The percentage of non-churchgoers saying the same was 42%.)
The survey excluded observant Jews, Muslims, Hispanic Catholics, and Black Protestants—groups that have experienced discrimination, imprisonment, torture, and genocide. However, one would think that Christians who commemorate the torture and death of Jesus Christ each year on Good Friday—as well as Jews who recall every Yom Kippur the torture of the ten Rabbis who refused to renounce their faith—would recognize that torture is not about "ticking bombs" but about submission to the rule of the powerful.
Torture—the deliberate inflicting of physical and psychological pain upon a helpless person—has never been used as a means of eliciting information to save lives. While the Romans often used torture to impose their rule, its modern application began during the Spanish Inquisition. The purpose of the Inquisition was to "purify" Spain under its Christian monarchy. Muslims and Jews were given the choice—convert, get out, or die. Occupying prominent positions in their society, Spain's Jews were reluctant to uproot, so many of them converted. Many of those continued to practice Judaism secretly. Through the Inquisition, authorities commanded the submission of the population by citing the threat of a secret enemy that had to be expunged—Jews who were emissaries of the devil, Jews who brought the plague, Jews who continued to worship in secret. People were paid large sums of money to inform on their neighbors, conversos who may or may not have been observing Jewish practices in secret. Once captured, these accused Jews were subjected to horrific tortures, forced to confess, and forced to denounce family members and friends as heretics. Thus were created other victims to torture, and more heretics to arrest. In the giant pyramid scheme of the torture state, ultimately, everyone can be a victim.
This cruel scenario found itself repeated in different times and places around the world—Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany, Communist China, the Southern Cone of South America. And now in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram AFB. Under unbearable pain, victims have confessed to crimes they may or may not have committed (and that may or may not have been crimes in the first place), fingered acquaintances who may or may not have been complicit, and described plots that may or may not have existed. The revelation of the “crime,” “accomplice,” and “plot” then justifies the torture and offers propaganda value to the torturer. In the closed, secret world of the torture chamber, the victim tells the torturer whatever the torturer wants to hear and those on the outside have no way of knowing what is true or false.
But that’s not all. When one person has complete power over another, torture serves as an instrument of revenge. The desire to take revenge for the massive deaths of the bubonic plague—then believed to be biological warfare carried out by Jews but what we now know to be caused by microbes spread in unsanitary conditions—fueled popular support of the Inquisition. Nowadays, we can take out our anger at the 3,000 lost on September 11, 2001 upon the body of the “mastermind” waterboarded 183 times in one month and all the other accused Al-Qaeda operatives. (And do we really know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind, as he confessed under torture?)
Torture is directed not only against the helpless prisoner; it sends a message to the community—the prisoner’s community and everyone else in the society. The tortured prisoner serves as an example to anyone else who steps out of line. The torture and execution of crypto-Jews during the Inquisition was made into a public spectacle in the plaza, with a clear lesson delivered by priests, bishops, and cardinals. The release of the Abu Ghraib photos might have outraged many in the United States, but to the prisoners’ families and other Iraqis they were a warning: “We have the power, and this is what we can do to you.”
In my just-released novel Gringolandia, prison officials in Pinochet's Chile repeatedly and brutally torture journalist Marcelo Aguilar, my teenage protagonist’s father. Convinced that Marcelo ordered the assassination of the former prison commander, the new commander at one point slams his head against the wall, fracturing his skull and causing permanent brain damage. For months afterward, Marcelo cannot speak, and even when he regains his speech, he has lost much of his long-term memory, so that he cannot recall anything about the death of the former commander. To his captors, was this a torture session gone wrong, or was it one that went all too well?