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Chapter Ill, Reading 12 "In Their Own Words: The World of the Torturer" So how do the torturers themselves explain who they have become and what it is like to live as they do? It is not easy to find people who have committed these kinds of crimes and then are willing to talk about them, but Ronald Crelinsten gathered testimony from a variety of sources and distilled a set of insights into a world few of us will ever inhabit. His essay in The Politics of Pain provides a good summary of what we have learned about who torturers are. I shall begin this brief glimpse into the world of the torturer with [...] an interrogator's manual from the central prison-execution facility ofthe Khmer Rouge, a place called S-21 or Tuol Sleng. The S-21 Interrogator's Manual contains the following description of torture, under the heading ''The Question of Doing Torture": The purpose oftorturing is to get their responses. It's not something we do for the fun ofit. Thus, we must make them hurt so that they will respond quickly. Another purpose is to break them [psychologically] and to make them lose their will. It's not something that's done out of individual anger, or for self-satisfaction. Thus we beat them to make them afraid but absolutely not to kill them. When torturing it is necessary to examine their state of health first and necessary to examine the whip. Don't greedily want to quickly kill them-bring them to death. This chilling glimpse into the Khmer Rouge's "bureaucracy of death" highlights the principal features of the torturer's world: first, the torturer is doing a job, he is "doing torture"; second, he is supposed to do it well, "mastering torture"; third, he is supposed to achieve certain results ("make them talk"), i.e., obtaining confessions, breaking the enemy's will; fourth, the central method used to achieve these results is inflicting pain ("make them hurt"); fifth, the people upon whom this pain is inflicted are defined as "enemies." The information, the confessions, and, ultimately, the broken people, are the end products of the torturer's work. It is these end products by which he is judged as skilled or unskilled, deserving of promotion or dismissal, considered indispensable or expendable. It is this judgment or assessment of the torturer's work that leads us to the final feature of the torturer's world: the torturer is working in an institutional context, within a hierarchy in which others, his superiors and their superiors and their superiors, decide who is an enemy, what needs to be known, and what must be done to know it. [...] There are no half-measures in the world of the torturer. You do what 142 Chapter III you have to do because it is part of the job. As one Brazilian victim of torture told his interviewer: ''Nor could [he] console himselfthat the men who applied the wires to his testicles were depraved. They seemed to practice sexual torture only because it was most efficient." The Purpose of Torture While torture appears to revolve around interrogation-a series of questions and answers that can presumably be ended if all the questions are answered-it is more complex than this. Ask ex-torturers directly why they torture and the results usually focus on the information and confession aspects. A Uruguayan officer: "to extort confessions"; a Namibian soldier: "to detect guerrillas"; a Peruvian police officer: "to force someone to talk, you had to interrogate with violence. People were sought and we as police agents had to handle the investigation.... The investigation was necessary and so we also had to torture." Even General Hugo Medina, head of the Uruguayan army during the defeat of the Tupamaros,36 used the standard line [...]: "in many instances, the life of one of our comrades was in danger, and it was necessary to get information quickly. That is what made it necessary to compel them [read "torture them"]. But "making them talk" implies more thanjust making them talk about something in particular. "Making them talk" is also about power, about imposing one's will on another. One party is absolutely powerful, the other, coerced party is totally powerless and defenseless. One party can ask and answer, act and react, while the other party can only react verbally, never knowing whether the verbal reaction will trigger renewed violence or death. Resistance and compliance, innocence and guilt, might...

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