Rex Bloomstein
Torturers, Part 2
Rex Bloomstein - Torturers, Part 2
- Good evening, everybody, and thank you very much for joining me. The subject I’m dealing with this evening is torture and the torturer. Which, as you can imagine, and I should warn, will reveal disturbing facts and footage. Here is a short extract from a book by Jean Amery, who was born Hanns Mayer in Vienna, the only child of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father. He recognised the significance of his Jewish identity after the proclamation of the Nuremberg Laws. Fleeing to Belgium, he joined the resistance. In 1943, he was captured and tortured by the Gestapo, and sent to a series of concentration camps. After the war, he wrote about these experiences in a fine series of essays called “At the Mind’s Limits” This is the final paragraph from the chapter he called “Torture.” “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction can never be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed, in part of the first blow, but in the end under torture fully will not be regained. That one’s fellow man was experienced as the anti-man remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into the world in which the principle of hope rules. One who was martyred is a defenceless prisoner of fear. It is fear that hence forth, reigns over him. Fear, and what is also called resentments. They remain, have scarcely a chance to concentrate into a seething, purifying thirst for revenge.” Tonight I’ll be showing further excerpts from “Torturers,” the second programme in my “Roots of Evil” series that I produced in the late 1990s. I’m showing this episode in two parts, so if I may remind you briefly about Monday’s presentation. We showed excerpts featuring survivors of torture from different countries describing their experiences at the hands of the torturer.
We witnessed disturbing scenes from the Stanford prison experiment with student guards intimidating their fellow student prisoners. And despite the controversies that surround the experiment, it offered the reflection that certain institutions and environments demand sadism and tyranny with people willing to commit cruelty in the name of a greater good. As an example, we showed the brutal training of police cadets in Brazil to potentially condition them to torture and evidence of the systematic use of torture in the dictatorship that dominated Argentina in the 1970s. I also mentioned that torture is specifically banned under article five of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which says, “No one shall be subject to torture or inhumane or degrading treatment.” I’d like to begin this second part by focusing on another Latin American country, this time, Chile. But first, some background. The growth of human rights legislation around the world, which we talked of earlier, has been crucial in helping the documentation of abuses and developing the ability to hold governments to account. This is particularly true of Chile, where the dictator, general Pinochet was responsible for the torture and deaths of thousands of Chileans. I’d been to Chile before, and embarked on a second visit to Santiago, the capital, to interview survivors of those years and to discover what had been done to come to terms with the abuses that had taken place.
The sequence I’m about to show you begins with Professor Martha Huggins, who reminds us of the impact that widespread torture has on a society. She concentrates on Latin America and offers valuable insight into the societal tension and fear that torture creates. We then come to Pedro Matta, a survivor of torture, interviewed at the site of Chile’s most notorious torture centre, the Villa Grimaldi. He recounts the cruelties that he and other people suffered in Santiago’s jails and detention centres, all part of a countrywide network of sites that supported the system of state violence. Pedro Matta was a student leader in the law school at the University of Chile, when Pinochet overthrew the Salvador Allende government in 1973. The infamous Villa Grimaldi had been taken over by the DINA, Augusto Pinochet’s special forces, to interrogate the people detained by the military during the massive roundups. Many important artists, thinkers, activists were disappeared and tortured, including Michelle Bachelet, who was later to become president of the country. It was here the military planned who they would target and evaluate the results of torture sessions. A short wave radio station kept them in contact with their counterparts throughout South America as part of Operation Condor, the transnational network of repressive military regimes operating in Latin America, in cooperation with the CIA.
They shared intelligence in their hunt for progressive leaders and militants on the run. Prisoners of Villa Grimaldi were divided up, separated, blindfolded and hooded, and kept in small locked cells. Regularly taken to the torture chamber with a bare metal bunk bed equipped with leather straps, a chair with straps for arms and feet, a table with instruments. Pedro Matta’s lifelong ambition is that Chile must never forget the four and a half thousand people who passed through Villa Grimaldi, and the 200 or so who were disappeared. He’s followed in this sequence by a fellow victim of torture, Dr. Luis Peebles, who illustrates how his survival depended on Amnesty International’s urgent action campaign, which he believes saved his life. So here is the sequence. Thank you, Emily.
Torture teaches obedience. Torture is a way of telling others that they too could be tortured. It’s a way of institutionalising a certain kind of passivity on a large scale, so that it’s an announcement to the rest of the population of what could happen to you.
[Narrator] Torture was also used to cow the entire population of Chile, which, like its neighbour Argentina, is reluctant to come to terms with its past. In the whole of Latin America, there is hardly a memorial to the victims of torture, but one man is fighting to stop his nation from forgetting its crimes. He was one of thousands of victims who were tortured on this site, the infamous Villa Grimaldi.
Many of my friends died. Many of my friends disappeared. The army took a great effort in trying to demolish what was the collective memory of what happened in this country during those years. We are going to build a memorial for what happened in Chile during the seventies. At the end of the Pinochet years, the army took heavy machinery to this place. There was a beautiful old colony and a Spanish-style house in that area. That house was demolished. The intention was to erase the memory of what happened in this place. Today, we would like to look to the future, but to keep memory of what happened, to keep memory of the past.
There were all the people who were killed without any reason. I was a militant. I had responsibilities in the resistance and everything, And some of the people die without any involvement, as a matter of fact. I don’t know how come I wasn’t killed, myself. I don’t know how I resist, anyway. But since my second or my first month in prison, there was Amnesty International, who made an urgent action, an urgent international action, and letters came into the military, asking for me.
Subsequent investigations by successive organisations and governments in Chile suggests between 10 and 30,000 cases of torture during the dictatorship. Pinochet was indicted several times for his crimes, but never convicted. To this day, a thousand former opponents of the Pinochet regime are still listed as missing. And decades on, despite some convictions, court cases against human rights abusers remain unresolved with ex-military officers having fled Chile to evade prosecution. As a former victim has written, it’s a wound that lacerates the national conscience. She wants her country to show the political will to reject impunity. In the film, I asked Sir Nigel Rodley, then the Special UN Rapporteur on torture, what the UN could do to stop torture and illustrated the enormous challenge this presents for the example of footage obtained during the terrible reign of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. We end the sequence with comments from Professor Robert Lifton on the power of evil and its banality, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt. Robert Lifton’s work is particularly concerned with the Holocaust and on the malleability of the contemporary self, as seen in the most destructive events of the 20th century and its implications for the 21st.
What we’re talking about is some very nasty practises going on in at least a third of the countries of the world, some 70 countries. I’m not saying, and I don’t believe, that in all those countries, torture is routine and systematic in all cases. I would say maybe half of those countries could say there is systematic and routine torture.
[Narrator] The universal Declaration of Human Rights, passed in 1948, forbids torture absolutely. Other conventions and legal provisions have followed, expressing the world’s disgust of this practise. Torture is condemned at every meeting of the UN Commission for Human Rights, which is attended by representatives of many countries which frequently torture their own citizens. The fact is that this evil is a powerful force, a dynamic which drives ordinary human beings and catches up whole societies in its momentum. How can the international community stop this evil?
The UN doesn’t have a world government. The UN can’t send in an international police force because torture is taking place in this, that, or the other country. All it can do is itself use its own clout to make its governments think twice, to increase the cost, and to contribute to that drip, drip, drip, like water on a stone, that over the long term can erode the stone and can do something to inhibit governments from resorting to these practises.
Evil takes on an energy of its own. Therefore, when Hannah Arendt made her famous statement about the banality of evil, she was right to to a considerable degree in my view. That is you can get very banal human beings, very ordinary human beings who are acculturated, who are socialised to evil. As happened with Nazis and has happened everywhere where there has been evil. But over time, where people participate in evil regularly, they change. They’re not so banal anymore. They begin to need the corpses. They begin to need to continue what they’re doing in order to affirm the justification of what they have done. And in that sense, they change and they become more demonic.
We came to expect such barbarism from Saddam’s regime, but it was also evident that the practise of torture was widespread in the Arab world. This took us to the Palestine authority where there were many reports of torture used, as Nigel Rodley said, on a systematic basis. Methods include beatings with cables, pulling out nails, suspension from the ceiling, flogging, kicking, cursing, electric shocks, sexual harassment, the threat of rape. Similar reports had emerged about Hamas, in Gaza. I obtained footage which featured a man called Jibrel Rajoub, then head of intelligence at the Palestine Authority. He was ultimately responsible for these practises. Here he is responding to the unfortunate death of a detainee in the Authority’s custody.
[Narrator] Many countries in the Middle East employ torture, including beatings and other practises, which sometimes lead to death. The newly formed Palestine Authority has been accused of habitually torturing suspects during interrogations.
[Narrator] This man died while in the hands of the security forces of the Palestine Authority.
Since we obtained that footage filmed in the 1990s, other Palestinian detainees have died at the hands of the torturers. Torture has continued, with report after report over the years detailing systematic abuse by law enforcement units within the Palestine Authority. Analysis shows that as much as 95% of the detainees were subjected to severe torture, others feeling the detrimental effects on their health for varying periods. A torture practise called the “shabeh,” which involves detainees being handcuffed and bound in stress positions for long stretches of time is the most widely-used form of torture. Hamas similarly subjects detainees to torture and abuse. The state of Palestine has ratified what is called the Optional Protocol for the Convention against Torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment in 2017, which essentially means a country agrees to inspections of its prisons and detention centres. Despite this, it seems that the security forces in the West Bank and Gaza continued in using torture and other ill-treatment. In 2018, the Independent Commission for Human Rights received 285 allegations of torture and other ill-treatment of detainees held by Palestinian security forces in the West Bank and by Hamas forces in Gaza. Also into 2018, the organisation Human Rights Watch published that the Authorities, both Palestinian and Hamas, routinely arrest and torture opponents and critics in what’s been described as “parallel police states,” and are committing what amounts to crimes against humanity.
This systematic abuse forms a critical part of what is seen as the repression of the Palestinian people and a failure to hold security forces accountable. In 2021, again, the Independent Commission for Human Rights reported similar numbers of complaints of torture and ill-treatment, and arbitrary arrest, in both Palestine and Gaza. Hamas have executed an estimated 28 people in Gaza since seizing political control in June 2007. In a context in which due process violations, coercion and torture are prevalent. They’ve summarily executed scores of other people without any judicial process, often on accusations of collaboration with Israel. It appears no independent scrutiny exists either in Gaza or Palestine. As we’ve heard, organisations like Human Rights Watch and Lawyers for Justice have reported continuously on Palestine, but they’ve also directed their attention to what they describe as mistreatment and torture by Israeli authorities in the occupied Palestinian territory and a seeming impunity concerning these abuses.
An Israeli rights group, the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, have noted more than 1300 complaints of torture that have been filed with Israel’s Justice ministries since 2001, stemming from acts allegedly carried out by Israeli authorities in Israel or the West Bank, including painful shackling, sleep deprivation, and exposure to extreme temperatures. They say these complaints have resulted in only two criminal investigations and no indictments over the past 20 years. I cite these facts, which are painful, I suggest, to anyone of Jewish identity, or as we’ve heard, anyone sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, but if you believe in human rights, if you believe they must be upheld and taught in all countries, then you cannot condone such activity, which is usually carried out in secret by forces of the state in the name of security or ideology. And that applies to whatever country this takes place in. So let me come to the sequence we did on Israel, which followed the sequence you’ve seen on Palestine in the film. It particularly draws on the sociologist, professor Stan Cohen, who lived and taught in Israel for many years and who was the author of a particularly significant book called, “States of Denial.”
[Narrator] This is another victim of Arab torturers, but Israelis, too, routinely maltreat Palestinians. Why does a democracy such as Israel tolerate this and permit greater evil such as torture? What can be done to root it out?
If we talk about how to combat evil, how to deal with it, I think traditionally we’ve always looked at the role of the perpetrator, of the offender, and either try and explain the psychology of the offender or the sociology of the background of that society. But that’s one corner, the offender, the perpetrator. Why do people torture? Why do people take part in political massacres? The second corner is the victim. You interview a victim and he says what it’s been like to be subjected to torture, and you think about how you can deal with that victim, how you can treat. But there’s a third corner, and the third corner is the bystander, the observer, the onlooker, the person who knows, the person who thinks, the person who’s made aware of what is going on and who the perpetrator relies upon for his or her silence. If we just take the example of torture, if we take the British in Northern Ireland, the French in Algeria, the Turks, now it’s a less open democratic society, but still formally, or the example that I’m particularly fascinated with, and I’ve been drawn to time and time again, of Israel and the occupied territories and the example which I’ve lived with for the last 15 years. You see, here you have a society where there’s an established middle class who owe their allegiance to liberal values, who will be upset about what happens in human rights violations in Chile or South Africa or East Timor, who would not ideologically support things like torture or death squad, undercover killings, or the kind of abuses that have occurred in the last five or six years particularly, and more important, that their knowledge of what is happening is open. There’s a free media, there’s freedom of expression, there’s relative freedom of demonstration, there’s academic freedom, they can talk about it, They can talk out. They’re not like the the repressed population of Iraq. They can’t openly talk out, and yet, the level of their response has always seemed to be disproportionate to the extent of the problem.
[Narrator] The Israeli government and judiciary described the use of torture by the security forces as, “moderate physical pressure,” but thousands of Palestinians who have been interrogated by the security agencies have a different view. Beatings, shacklings, sleep deprivation, and violent shaking are routine. These practises have been condemned by the UN Committee against Torture as unacceptable. Why has the practise of torture become acceptable to so many Israelis?
[Cohen] First is outright denial. Secondly, once evidence is shown that something does happen, people come out of torture rooms with with injuries, the government and the people can then can say, “Well, yes, something’s happening, that’s true, but it’s not– What is happening is not what you think it is. It’s something else. It belongs to a different category. It’s not torture, but it’s ‘moderate physical pressure,’” which is the phrase used by an Israeli government judicial commission. It’s special procedures. It’s depth interrogation. Thirdly, anyway, it’s justified. In other words, what is happening can largely be rationalised and justified. There’s security needs, there’s terrorism, there’s Hamas suicide bombers, there’s the peace process to rescue. We have to do everything we can to prevent things being destabilised and to be secure. Fourth, there’s routinization or normalisation. That is to say, this whole language becomes part of everyday life. When a man called Mohammed Harizat was tortured to death by the Israeli authorities in March last year, within a few weeks after that, people were having ordinary discussions. I heard a discussion on the bus about the methods that were used. He was shaken to death by his collar, and there was a discussion in the paper about whether it’s permitted to shake by the collar, or by the neck, or by the shoulder. Now, once you start having these discussions on buses, you’re at stage four, you’re saying, “Well, you know, it’s inevitable. We don’t particularly like it, but this is what happened.” And I think those stages have to be present in order to understand why the reaction is disproportionate. And in order to try and get to our problem of combating evil, which is the problem of converting knowledge into action. Without that, we’ve just got a pile of atrocity stories.
That pile of atrocity stories and converting words into action are haunting to hear some 26 years later. I’d like to give a further historical context to the sequence we’ve just seen by quoting from documents and reports that cover that particular period. It seems the Israeli security service, Shin Bet, relied on earlier recommendations of a state commission headed by the retired Supreme Court Justice Moshe Landau, who I remember as the president of the court in the Eichmann trial. The commission that he presided over held that, “In order to prevent terrorism, Shin Bet interrogators were permitted to use psychological pressure and a moderate degree of physical pressure.” Now, think about what that means. They were allowing interrogators to carry out psychological and physical pressure on the mind and body of a detainee. This permission was grounded, in the commission’s opinion, in the “necessity defence” laid out in Israeli penal law. In practise, the interrogation methods used during that time went far beyond a reasonable interpretation of the term, “moderate physical pressure.” This state of affairs persisted for years, despite the right not to be subjected to ill treatment or torture, whether physical or psychological, being one of the few human rights that are considered absolute. And an absolute right may never be balanced against other rights and values, and cannot be suspended or limited, even in difficult circumstances. Torture is absolutely forbidden and cannot be used under any circumstances. In September 1999, following a series of petitions filed by human rights organisations and by Palestinians interrogated by the Shin Bet, Israel’s high court of justice ruled that Israeli law does not empower such interrogators to use physical means in interrogation. The justices ruled that the specific methods discussed in the petitions, including painful binding, shaking, placing a sack on a person’s head for prolonged periods of time, and sleep deprivation were unlawful. However, they also held that agents who exceed their authority and use physical pressure may not necessarily bear criminal responsibility for their actions if later found to have used these methods in a “ticking bomb case,” based on the necessity defence.
Well, whilst reports of torture and ill-treatment in interrogations dropped for a while, several recent reports, published by Israeli human rights organisations, indicate hundreds of Palestinians were put under psychological and physical pressure after the high court’s ruling. Since 2001, not a single criminal investigation has been launched into a complaint against an interrogator. According to Addameer, a Palestinian prisoner support organisation, at the end of 2022, there are nearly 5,000 political prisoners. They also report on the detention of 160 children. A survey by Save the Children found that over 80% of children in the Israeli military detention system are beaten. They are also subject to strip searches, psychological abuse, weeks in solitary confinement, and being denied access to a lawyer during interrogation. By enabling the existence of this abusive interrogation regime, the authorities all bear responsibility for the severe violations of interrogatees’ human rights and for the mental and physical harm inflicted on these individuals. Now, these are facts that appear in the reports I’ve mentioned and shared with you. Believe them or not, but can you imagine the violence and rage that again stalks the situation in Israel? Extremism on both sides will be greatly encouraged, to the detriment of all, and the use of torture continues.
I’d like now to turn to our final sequence, which we concentrated on in our 1997 series, and it concerned another country where torture is prevalent, and it’s particularly saddening to do so, for that country is Turkey. We’ve been witnessing the devastating suffering of so many Turkish and Syrian people since the earthquakes, and the world will judge how competent or corrupt, particularly the Turkish elite have been in dealing with this tragedy and not preparing for it. And it is those same elites who’ve been responsible for turning a blind eye to the widespread and systematic use of torture in Turkey. And I hope you’ll agree for that reason alone I include the sequence. Torture goes back to the Ottoman Empire. After the foundation of the Republic of Turkey, the torture of civilians by the Turkish armed forces was widespread. Amnesty International first documented torture after the 1971 Turkish coup d'etat, and has continued to issue critical reports, particularly after the outbreak of the Kurdish-Turkish conflict in the 1980s. This continued into the 1990s with the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture issuing critical reports on the extent of torture in Turkey. The Stockholm Centre for Freedom published “Mass Torture and Ill-Treatment in Turkey” in June 2017. The Human Rights Foundation of Turkey estimates there have been a million victims of torture in Turkey. Allegations of torture and ill treatment in police custody and prisons have rarely been subject to effective investigations or to the prosecution of perpetrators. Opposition politicians, journalists, writers, human rights defenders, and others, faced baseless investigations, prosecutions and convictions. The situation today appears to be much the same as when I interviewed Mickael Suphi for our film in 1997. As you’ll see and hear, Mickael became a torturer for the Turkish army, and his experience encapsulates how a young man, and in a sense, any young man, can be selected and brutalised and made to torture people in the name of the state. But before we examine his remarkable story as an apprentice torturer, we begin with Professor Ron Crelinsten, again on those torturers, rare as they are, who’ve spoken out and admitted their crimes. So here is our final sequence.
Most of the torturers who have spoken out, either to Amnesty International human rights organisations, or who have been tried or confess, are ex-torturers. They’ve fled, they’ve quit. But that’s very rare. And most of them are in fear of their lives. Exit is very difficult. There are two concepts, exit and voice. When you’re inside, do you voice any dissidence? Do you complain? Or do you exit, you get out. And the ultimate question is, “Do I obey or do I disobey?” And most of them will obey. The professional who wants to get ahead, he’ll obey.
So when I came to the army, I was quite stupid, idiot, naive, you can call it naive. I was a very naive boy, 20 years old, without knowing anything about Turkey, really. I was born in Belgium, so Turkey was another world for me. I just know Turkey from my parents. We had been every year to vacation.
[Narrator] Mickael Suphi describes his military training in the Turkish army as brutal. He came out of it full of hate and fear. After 45 days, he was told by a senior officer that he had been selected to act as a translator during interrogations because he spoke a number of foreign languages. Mickael was sent to an interrogation centre near Ankara.
And in the centre of that town was an officer’s house, and I had to present myself there. So I came to that officer’s house, and the first step I did inside, I was already beaten completely. I was knocked out, and they brought me to an officer. And that man told me what my real function was going to be in Turkey. My real function was to go and interrogate people with torture techniques. He changed my name directly, he gave me a code name. My name became Farac. He told me also that we were working for the Contra-Guerrilla, what was a unit in Turkey that fights against the Kurdish opposents. He told me that my languages were very useful for Turkey because a lot of tourists also were trafficking drugs, but mainly was he was talking about the Kurdish people. And the Kurdish people was, in his eyes, the enemy. The first, number one. The first two days they tortured us, physically and psychologically. So we became so scared that we, after two days, we had torturing practise, and we didn’t hesitate to do it, because we were afraid to be tortured ourself. So one of the torture techniques, the most, one of the first ones was the falaka. The falaka is, you take a chair like this, We put the victim on the floor on his back with his head on this side, and we put down the chair like that. We take his legs and we put it between, we enter it here and it becomes– his feet come in here. Somebody’s sitting on his feet here, and the victim is still downstairs. So when somebody sits here, he cannot move because he will break his legs with all the pressure on. So then we had to give him, we had to give him each 10 baston beats on his feet, on the back, what can lead to amputation of the feet. And I saw from the feet from that old man from 60 years was one of the first victims.
I saw meat going away from his feet. After I came to the reporter, and the reporter was accused to put some interview in some newspaper, I had to give, personally, to let him eat a newspaper, pieces of newspapers. And he was hanged up with his hands on the wall, took the sticker off. That man was trying to say something, he was kicked directly. That moment happened something. When I give him that, let him eat that newspaper, I look to my officer valet, and that day something changed in my mind. This was the second session. And I looked to my officer valet, and I was so afraid of him, that I start to give kicks, to punch that man. I didn’t know that man. I was told he was bad, he was a left, from the left party in Turkey, was not good for Turkey. So, automatically, when I looked to my officer’s eye, I was so afraid that I start to kick that man. That moment changed in me something. That moment, I didn’t ask questions anymore, I just did what told me. So I became really, somebody that tortured without any questions. The seventh day, something happened that changed completely my life. We enter in that room again and we had a child before us. That child had to have been something between eight and twelve years old, not older, was very little. The blue punch on his head, he was already beat before coming to us. And he was a terrorist. They told us he was– some teeth and some bats, Kurdish little boy. He had to go to Birampash and they told us that this child is going to be to– had to be brought to Birampash. But before going, we had to torture the child and the valet chose me out to give the child ten bastins on the feet of the child, the falaka. I told earlier that no one changed something in my mind. I don’t know what happened there, but I saw that child, I saw my colleagues, I saw I was looking in the eyes for everybody, and I just put that bastin on the floor, and I said, “Do it yourself.”
So I changed completely what I was told all these days, that people were bad and terrorists, and changed in my mind when I saw the child. Couldn’t be a terrorist, that child even couldn’t have a gun in his hand because too heavy for carrying it. So after, I was beat completely. I was kicked, I was put knockout. The last thing I remember was that valet was giving me kicks with his hands and with punches and everything. If that child maybe came two weeks later– the child came after seven days. If that child maybe came after a couple of more sessions, maybe I had tortured that child. Maybe they brought that child too fast to me. When I saw that child, eight years old, I thought directly, “This child cannot be a terrorist. This child cannot be bad. It’s a child that doesn’t deserve to get tortured.” So after, all this brainwash completely disappeared and I refused to torture then.
[Interviewer] But in fact, if they hadn’t brought that child at that moment, you might have continued.
Yeah, maybe I was still there, torturing other child, children, woman. Turkey, you have no limits for torture. Once you’re in Turkey, they torture anything. They torture– I know cases from women, pregnant, children, everything. Innocent people, old men, 80 years old. There’s no age– start from small on, you know. So when people, I think when you start– When you come to them, you don’t think anymore, you become a machine, you become something cold, you become something without feelings. You don’t have friends anymore. You don’t have a good heart anymore. Just that bad thing that’s in you when you say, “Torture, it’s your job. It’s your function for your country.” But that child changed my mind, saved my life, maybe, but maybe not his life.
[Narrator] Most torturers are the anonymous tools of the state. Mickael Suphi escaped. The child touched what remained of his humanity, but his life has been deeply marked by evil.
I’ve been to Turkey like a young, naive young man. I came back like they changed a little soldier in a monster. That’s what I became. And even now, after so many years, affects me. I still have problems to live with it. I still have problems to accept it, what I did. It’s maybe why I confessed, but maybe, too, in small phrase, they make from a young innocent man a machine to go and torture people. They wake up that monster inside of a human being. They take all the good love and they put all the bad inside. It’s the only thing they want to do.
If I may, I’d like to summarise the key facts and reasons behind the appalling human practise of torture that I’ve tried to address. Today, no government will admit that it willfully commits or condones torture or try to justify it. Yet despite this and various campaigns, which some have called the mobilisation of shame, it carries on in many countries, either secretly or in plain sight. Torture could be a side effect of a broken criminal justice system in which underfunding, lack of judicial independence, or corruption undermines effective investigations and fair trials. Understaffed, or poorly trained police are more likely to resort to torture when interrogating suspects. Torturers rely on both active supporters and those who ignore it. Military intelligence, psychology, medical, and legal professionals can all be complicit in torture. Bureaucracy could diffuse responsibility for torture and help perpetrators excuse their actions. Torture is also enabled by moral disengagement from the victims and impunity for the perpetrators, as criminal prosecutions for torture are rare. There is a lack of evidence to support the common assumption that torturers are psychologically pathological. Many rely on alcohol or drugs.
Torturers act from a variety of motives, as well as ideological commitment, personal gain, fear pressure due to competitive masculinity, avoiding punishment, or avoiding guilt from previous acts of torture. In most cases of systematic torture, the torturers have been desensitised to violence by being exposed to physical or psychological abuse during training. Elite and specialised police units are particularly prone to torturing, perhaps because of their tight-knit nature and insulation from scrutiny. In all this stands the figure of the torturer. He’s a historic and contemporary figure. He doesn’t go away. He is our dark shadow. And as you’ve seen, we can train him and instruct him to bring pain and terror to a defenceless human being. I’m sure most of us recall in horror what possible justification could there be to make someone suffer in order to get someone to confess. But as we know, and as we’ve seen, there have been torturers throughout human history, and techniques of torture have been developed and continue. I’d like to finish with these words of the UN Special Rapporteur, “The prohibition of torture is one of the greatest social contracts of humanity. The prohibition underpins who we are as human beings expressing our shared universal aspiration to live in societies free of fear, discrimination, intimidation, and depression.” The absolute prohibition against torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment is found in article five, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and many international treaties is absolute and sacrosanct. Yet it is a fragile right, constantly being tested, resurrected, and at times tolerated or excused. It is our individual and collective responsibility to preserve it, as without it, there is only darkness and despair. Thank you for watching, and joining me on this. Emily, is there any–?
[Emily] Yes, thank you, Rex. There are a few questions.
[Rex] Right.
Q&A and Comments:
Q - [Emily] The first, from James. “What form of pressure is acceptable to get information from terrorists?”
A - What form of pressure, indeed? Well, I think interrogation mustn’t lead to physical and psychological abuse. There are interrogation techniques, you know, police use them all the time. There are limits, profound limits, as I’ve tried to explain all through this lecture. So they have to be, I mean, there are methods to get people to talk and I think, obviously, with terrorism it raises so many profound issues, but we cannot move to those areas where torture takes place. So the pressure that’s put on has to be legitimate, has to be within guidelines, has to be observed and scrutinised. That’s the key to it. Thank you.
Q - [Emily] Have you ever done an investigation into South Africa?
A - I haven’t, actually. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I think, documented a huge amount of torture in South Africa. And of course, Steve Biko, I think, died under the hands of the torturers. It was widespread and practised and as cruel as anywhere you can find it. But I haven’t explored it with the same depth I have these other countries.
Q - [Emily] Are you aware of any data to show that torturers have past experiences themselves with torturing resulting from school bullying or home bullying?
A - I think there is– I’m sure there is evidence that a number of torturers, many torturers have abusive childhoods, as indeed many people convicted of criminal offences do, have abused childhoods. It is not an excuse, I’m afraid, it’s not a justification for such practises. Many people have difficult and abusive childhoods, but don’t go on to carry out those practises on other people. So in the end, it’s a choice, but it is part of our understanding, I think, of human violence, to know about people’s childhoods, to know about the situations they found themselves in that led them to become abused or to become used to violence, and then to use violence. I think this is a very important area, to our childhoods, our family relations, are crucial in who we are as human beings. And I think abused children often become abusers. I mean, there’s no doubt about that. But it is a choice, in the end, and it cannot be an excuse or justification, as I say, to carry out such practises ourselves.
Q - [Emily] What do you think about social media torture?
A - Very unpleasant. It’s a very interesting point, that, isn’t it? Social media has such a potentially dark side. It’s led people, as we read every day, to suicide and tremendous unhappiness. Somehow, under the cloak of anonymity, people can unleash a lot of rage, and that rage can become very abusive, and cruel, and can lead to a huge amount of suffering. And I think it’s one of the great challenges of the web that somehow, we get to understand that, and control– I don’t know how you control such a thing, but it’s undoubtedly true that if you’re anonymous, you feel you can get away with things. That’s why scrutiny and accountability are so crucial and the web and social media has to develop along those lines. I think we’re seeing this debate all the time, and it’s a crucial one, because so many people, all of us seem now to use social media. So it’s like freedom of expression. There are limits, there are situations which we have to and cannot justify and have to control, have to stop. And that debate goes on all the time. It must go on all the time.
Q - [Emily] Did you learn how much information that was gained by use of torture was true? And if perpetrators of torture know information is not reliable, why is this practise continued?
A - That’s a very good point. Perhaps torturers don’t believe that they can’t get the truth. They can’t get that crucial bit of information and they want to terrorise. And it must be so that victims have given way under torture, and told them what they know. I mean, it’s a terrifying experience, no doubt about that, and I’ve interviewed, as you’ve seen, victims of torture, and I’ve interviewed torturers. It’s a practise which exercises power on behalf of the authority and word gets out about that. So it’s a form of terror in itself. But there’s obviously a belief amongst torturers and police units, and army units, that we must get information, and the way to do this, as the Americans did, the Americans, you know, and Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo Bay, they believed in enhanced interrogation techniques, a euphemism for torture. They believe they could get information. And of course, fear and anxiety drives this, and acts of terror are terrible, you know, but it mustn’t lead us to degrade ourselves even more. And I think that’s the point. As I said before, we have to have scrutiny and accountability to stop such practises. But undoubtedly, it’s a reality in many police and military units around the world that without scrutiny they will do anything to get at information. And often, and I suspect, much of that information is useless. And then they’re carried away by the power they have exercised by authorities and their superiors. And that’s why it’s worth studying, exploring what the Americans did under the war on terror. I think they’ve descended, and used these techniques entirely unjustifiably. And I use that just as one example. I’ve given many examples in the programmes. I would doubt the information you get, I think, I suspect I would say anything, I suspect most of us watching would say anything, if under electric torture, or ghastly things that take place. So I suppose it’s evaluated by these torturers and their administrative units. And I suppose on some occasions, as I’ve said, it could well have provided information, but on the whole, how valuable is it? And especially as you cannot justify it, and especially, it’s illegal in our world.
[Emily] Great. Thank you, Rex. That’s all the questions we have for you.
Thank you very much Emily, and thank you all for listening to a very tough subject and I hope you got something from it.