Review: 'Torture and Democracy' is definitive
Michael O'Donnell
San Francisco Chronicle
Torture and Democracy
By Darius Rejali
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS; 849 PAGES; $39.50
A"dunk" in water, said Vice President Dick Cheney in October 2006, referring to waterboarding, is "a no-brainer for me" if it can save lives. The statement set off a media uproar and soon was hedged with Orwellian qualifiers and obfuscations: America doesn't torture, full stop. But we use tough, "enhanced" interrogation techniques, and we won't tell you what they are. Apparently, that means that waterboarding is not torture. Watch the trick in slow motion, but with a flashier example: (1) we saw off fingers; but (2) we do not torture; ergo (3) sawing off fingers isn't torture.
But waterboarding is torture. The technique includes strapping a prisoner to a tilted board that elevates his feet and lowers his head and stuffing cloth into his mouth while water is poured over his (usually bagged) face. It is frequently, and inaccurately, described as creating a "sensation of drowning." Nonsense: Waterboarding is forced drowning, interrupted, for the prisoner will die if the flow of water is not cut off in time. So in defending waterboarding, Cheney is saying that near-suffocation is not torture. Presumably, interrogators may also permissibly tie a plastic bag onto a prisoner's head until his face turns blue. In our new paradigm, non-scarring brutality that doesn't actually kill the prisoner is legitimate. Take a left, then another left and if you pass death, you've gone too far.
Like other tortures, waterboarding has a history, and oh how soon we forget. An American soldier was court-martialed in 1968 when the Washington Post ran a photo of him waterboarding a Vietnamese prisoner, and, in 1947, the United States prosecuted Japanese officer Yukio Asano for war crimes for the same behavior. Darius Rejali, a political scientist and noted expert on torture, explains that waterboarding is simply a variant of an old Dutch style of water choking. Dutch paymasters used it on British merchants in the East Indies as early as 1622, presumably as a sort of early kneecapping when the Brits didn't meet sales figures. Waterboarding also appeared briefly in Algeria and Cyprus in the 1950s, and in Pol Pot's Cambodia in the 1970s.
Rejali's massive book, "Torture and Democracy," is an exhaustive study of this and other "clean tortures," or tortures that leave no permanent scars. Electrotorture, water tortures, stress and duress positions, beating, noise, drugs and forced exercises all make an appearance. The book is a towering achievement, a serious work of social science on an urgent topic that is too frequently surrounded by assumption and myth. It should be read and disseminated widely. Better hold Cheney's copy, though - he'd probably mine the appendices for new ideas.
The book is devoted to exploding one myth in particular: that clean tortures can casually and reliably be traced to the ancients, or, failing that, to the Nazis. Rejali's provocative thesis is that most clean tortures were actually born in democracies, especially imperial Britain and France. He persuasively argues that the rise of clean torture was a reaction to transparency and monitoring in democratic states: Torturers could carry on despite public scrutiny as long as they left no scars. Although Rejali does not discuss it, this thesis plays out daily in the American legal system. Immigration courts, for instance, handle thousands of asylum applications every year, and judges usually demand that alleged torture victims produce evidence of scarring or hospitalization. No scars means no torture, and the applicant is sent home.
(Continued here.)
San Francisco Chronicle
Torture and Democracy
By Darius Rejali
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS; 849 PAGES; $39.50
A"dunk" in water, said Vice President Dick Cheney in October 2006, referring to waterboarding, is "a no-brainer for me" if it can save lives. The statement set off a media uproar and soon was hedged with Orwellian qualifiers and obfuscations: America doesn't torture, full stop. But we use tough, "enhanced" interrogation techniques, and we won't tell you what they are. Apparently, that means that waterboarding is not torture. Watch the trick in slow motion, but with a flashier example: (1) we saw off fingers; but (2) we do not torture; ergo (3) sawing off fingers isn't torture.
But waterboarding is torture. The technique includes strapping a prisoner to a tilted board that elevates his feet and lowers his head and stuffing cloth into his mouth while water is poured over his (usually bagged) face. It is frequently, and inaccurately, described as creating a "sensation of drowning." Nonsense: Waterboarding is forced drowning, interrupted, for the prisoner will die if the flow of water is not cut off in time. So in defending waterboarding, Cheney is saying that near-suffocation is not torture. Presumably, interrogators may also permissibly tie a plastic bag onto a prisoner's head until his face turns blue. In our new paradigm, non-scarring brutality that doesn't actually kill the prisoner is legitimate. Take a left, then another left and if you pass death, you've gone too far.
Like other tortures, waterboarding has a history, and oh how soon we forget. An American soldier was court-martialed in 1968 when the Washington Post ran a photo of him waterboarding a Vietnamese prisoner, and, in 1947, the United States prosecuted Japanese officer Yukio Asano for war crimes for the same behavior. Darius Rejali, a political scientist and noted expert on torture, explains that waterboarding is simply a variant of an old Dutch style of water choking. Dutch paymasters used it on British merchants in the East Indies as early as 1622, presumably as a sort of early kneecapping when the Brits didn't meet sales figures. Waterboarding also appeared briefly in Algeria and Cyprus in the 1950s, and in Pol Pot's Cambodia in the 1970s.
Rejali's massive book, "Torture and Democracy," is an exhaustive study of this and other "clean tortures," or tortures that leave no permanent scars. Electrotorture, water tortures, stress and duress positions, beating, noise, drugs and forced exercises all make an appearance. The book is a towering achievement, a serious work of social science on an urgent topic that is too frequently surrounded by assumption and myth. It should be read and disseminated widely. Better hold Cheney's copy, though - he'd probably mine the appendices for new ideas.
The book is devoted to exploding one myth in particular: that clean tortures can casually and reliably be traced to the ancients, or, failing that, to the Nazis. Rejali's provocative thesis is that most clean tortures were actually born in democracies, especially imperial Britain and France. He persuasively argues that the rise of clean torture was a reaction to transparency and monitoring in democratic states: Torturers could carry on despite public scrutiny as long as they left no scars. Although Rejali does not discuss it, this thesis plays out daily in the American legal system. Immigration courts, for instance, handle thousands of asylum applications every year, and judges usually demand that alleged torture victims produce evidence of scarring or hospitalization. No scars means no torture, and the applicant is sent home.
(Continued here.)
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