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Torture: An Overview
By lynmiller-lachmann on 2009-05-07 08:23:53
The debate continues over the Bush Administration’s practice of torture and whether the new administration should
investigate and prosecute those responsible. Given the economic crisis, the need to reform the health care system, and other
priorities, one may wonder why investigating and prosecuting torture should even be a priority. Or on a more basic level,
why should we even care? In the 1980s I lived in Madison, Wisconsin and worked with refugees from Central and South
America. My experiences led me to write a novel about a refugee family in the United States, dealing with the aftermath of a
father’s torture as a political prisoner in Chile under the Pinochet dictatorship. By the early 1990s Chile had fallen out of the
news and I put the manuscript aside to pursue other projects. The revelations at Abu Ghraib motivated me to pick it up
again. After a total revision, the novel is finally being published this week under the title Gringolandia. ( If you want to buy
a copy of this book you can Visit http:/www.amazon.com/Gringolandia-Lyn-Miller-Lachmann/dp/1931896496/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245427458&sr=1-
4 but readers are encouraged to support local independent book stores by purchasing it locally.) My work on Gringolandia
has led me to think about the issue of torture and why we should care. Obviously, others care as well; otherwise, the Fox
network program 24 would have been cancelled years ago. 24 is a political thriller designed to show that torture is a
necessary evil to save innocents from a “ticking bomb” about which a detainee has knowledge. Others have argued that
torture is an ineffective method of uncovering plots and locating perpetrators, that it generates false information because a
detainee will say anything to stop the pain. Still others say that we should not even debate the effectiveness of torture
because it is morally wrong to inflict harm deliberately on another human being. Torture violates our fundamental values as
a nation—that which makes the United States different from, say, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Castro’s Cuba, or Pinochet’s
Chile. I ask readers to consider three questions: What is torture? Why is torture wrong? What is the long-term impact of
torture on the victim, the perpetrator, the families of victims and perpetrators, and the society as a whole? Understanding
what torture is gets us beyond the “ticking bomb” argument. Torture—the deliberate inflicting of physical and psychological
pain upon an imprisoned person—has never been used as a means of eliciting information to save lives. Not during the
Spanish Inquisition, not in Stalinist Russia, not in Nazi Germany, not in Chile under Pinochet, and not in Abu Ghraib,
Bagram AFB, and Guantanamo today. 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.
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?) Closely related to revenge fantasies are other, darker fantasies
involving sexual tortures and the rape of both female and male prisoners, such as the images that emerged from Abu Ghraib.
Those sadistic individuals who appear to enjoy the debasement of other human beings inhabit the entire chain of command,
from the actual jailers to the leaders who give the orders. 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 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 novel Gringolandia, prison officials 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? To be continued.
