The Long Shadow of Torture

[REACTIVATED IN CT]

This morning "Speaking of Faith" broadcast an interview of author Darius Rejali,an Iranian-American who is a professor of political science at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and author of Torture and Democracy.


Excerpts from the transcript which can be found here

http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/torture/transcript.shtml

<snip>
Torture is very dangerous for four professions, basically: lawyers, politicians, medical professionals, and journalists. And it's dangerous for all of them because they can kind of get sucked into this little step by step where — they happen for two or three reasons. One is that peer pressure, which is that as a group we're not going to notice the big elephant in the room. <snip>

<snip>
Once you authorize a torture bureaucracy, it has a number of unforeseen consequences. Let's put it in this most basic form. When you authorize torture, you give one individual, however you want to describe this, absolute power over another individual. And we can't look at the history of slavery without knowing how corrupting that is to a society. And we can't look at the history of torture without knowing how corrupting that is to governments that authorize it. It sets into motion a series of changes which often take 10 to 20 years for them to work out of a society, and some of them are bureaucratic. For example, a split develops in your agency between the professionals who want to do proper policing methods and the torturers who just want to whack the guy with the bat or stick his head in a vat of water. And usually one side or the other leaves. In the American case, many, many professionals, FBI, CIA, etc., left the agencies. So that's one.
But the other problem is you train a group of people to torture, what are they doing to do afterwards when they're decommissioned? Where do torturers go?

And the answer is that they go to private security and local police forces around your home and mine. And so torture that was international becomes domestic. Waterboarding was something that American forces first learned — this particular technique was learned, for the most part, during the American campaign in the Philippines in 1905. And when these troops come back to the United States, they become police officers all throughout the United States. And by the 1930s, the American Bar Association Committee documents that waterboarding is pretty common, especially in the American South. So techniques come home.

Same thing with Chicago. Torture has been documented in Chicago from 1973 to 1993. And the techniques that appear there, the electrical techniques, were first documented in American hands in southern Vietnam in 1963. So I think most people are unaware of the incredibly long shadow that torture casts, not just for a government but for a society and lastly, I think, for the families that are involved in this process. The cases of atrocity-related trauma … <snip>




He also discusses how to move forward - and its not just electing another leader.