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Introduction
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Introduction By definition torturers are cruel. But the corpses proved that they could also be clever. The Mujahadeen in Afghanistan, reported Amnesty International in 1994, were strapping live prisoners to newly dead corpses and leaving them, eye to eye, to rot together in the sun. What a simple, economical form oftorture, I thought to myselfas I read the report shortly after becoming executive director of Amnesty International U.S.A. Low-tech but terrifying. As my tenure at Amnesty lengthened, as I began to learn more, to meet survivors of torture and to hear their stories, and then to go into prisons and police stations where torture took place, I accumulated a longer and longer list ofways people inflict suffering on others. Beatings ofone kind or another were the simplest and most commonplace while electroshock gained in popularity over the past decade or so with the manufacture of ever more sophisticated equipment. But these techniques are prized only by those oflimited vision. Ifyou ever doubt the human capacity for ingenuity , you have but to consider the many other ways the human mind has fancied to torment the body and crush the spirit. In King Leopold's Congo a whip was made of raw, sun-dried hippopotamus hide cut into long, sharp-edged corkscrew strips. Twenty-five lashes brought unconsciousness. One hundred brought death.1 In Pinochet 's Chile women were raped by men with "visible open syphlitic sores," sexually abused by dogs trained in that practice, and forced to eat the human remains of their fellow captives.2 In Brazil prisoners were stripped naked and locked in small, bare concrete cells with only one other occupant -a boa constrictor.3 The Americans have always been fond ofwater torture. During our occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, our soldiers inserted bamboo tubes into victims' throats and poured in gallons of water, the filthier the better. The Filipinos got their revenge, however. They buried captured American soldiers up to their heads in manure, poured molasses over their heads, and dropped hundreds of fire ants into the molasses.4 Today we use the technique called waterboarding in which victims are forced underwater until they are convinced they will drown; then drawn back out for a moment; and immediately forced back in. 2 Introduction Most of us pay very little attention to torture; it is, after all, such an unpleasant subject. I have lived with it, albeit at secondhand, for twelve years now. On one level I understand it today as little as I did when I started. But on another I understand it all too well. Jean Paul Sartre said that Nothingness lies curled deep inside Being like a worm in an apple.5 In similar fashion, the capacity to harm another lies buried inside most of us. Fortunately the vast majority of us are taught to control the impulse. (Suppression offeelings has gotten a bad rap over the years but, as Sartre also once observed somewhere, if it were not for the petty rules of polite society, human beings would destroy one another.) But a few of us are taught the opposite. Chapter I (''Torture in Western History") reveals that in historical terms those "few" have a good bit of company. When people learned that I worked for Amnesty International, two reactions were not uncommon. One was an expression ofwonderment that I could hear so regularly of all the horrors in the world and not undergo a crisis of faith in humanity that rendered me depressed or paralyzed. The other was to make a joke about torture. Because it is so frightening, we joke about it to keep it at a distance. David Letterman delivered this line in one of his monologues on The Late Show: The guy who was the former chef at the White House has written a tell-all book. He says Dick Cheney's favorite recipe is Chicken Gitmo [Guantanamo Bay]. It's chicken bound and gagged on a bed of rice. The problem is that torture truly is, quite literally, unimaginable to those of us who have never undergone it. Unless you have been physically or psychologically abused yourself, it cannot be fully conjured up. When I am speaking about the subject, I sometimes invite the audience to swallow their saliva repeatedly to see how long they can do it before beginning to become uncomfortable and then imagine being forced to do that for two or three hours without stopping-which is...