JUAN GONZALEZ: On Capitol Hill, House Republicans
voted Tuesday to uphold President Bush’s veto of a bill that would have
banned CIA agents from waterboarding and other forms of torture. By a
225-to-188 vote, the Democratic-led House fell short of the needed two-thirds
votes to override the President.
The bill would have set a single standard for interrogations by US forces by
requiring all agencies follow the Army Field Manual. The manual specifically
bans waterboarding, mock executions, electric shocks, beatings, forcing sexual
acts and deprivation of food, water or medical care.
President Bush announced the veto on Saturday during his weekly radio address.
He defended the CIA’s program of using so-called “specialized
interrogation procedures.”
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH:
The main reason this program has been effective is that it allows the
CIA to use specialized interrogation procedures to question a small
number of the most dangerous terrorists under careful supervision. The
bill Congress sent me would deprive the CIA of the authority to use
these safe and lawful techniques. Instead, it would restrict the CIA’s
range of acceptable interrogation methods to those provided in the Army
Field Manual.
AMY GOODMAN: President Bush, giving his weekly
radio address, announcing his veto of the bill that would have banned the CIA
from waterboarding and other forms of torture.
Well, our next guest has been described as “one of the world’s leading
thinkers and writers on the subject of torture and the consequences of its use
for modern society.” His name is Darius Rejali. He is a professor of
political science at Reed College and author of a new book called Torture
and Democracy. His other books include Torture and Modernity: Self,
Society and State in Modern Iran.
Welcome to Democracy Now!
DARIUS REJALI: It’s good to be here.
AMY GOODMAN: You are from Iran?
DARIUS REJALI: Yes, I was born in Iran, and I
remember the times where the Shah of Iran used to say we need to be tough on
terrorists, and I remember what happened then, too, which was that he said
these guys are radicals and we need to be tough, and then what happened was
that the organization said—Khomeini said, “Look who’s medieval: the guys
who torture.” Nothing got more people on their side than our torturing.
AMY GOODMAN: Are you saying torture was the
inspiration for the Iranian revolution?
DARIUS REJALI: Most people don’t remember how
much torture was the inspiration for the Iranian revolution. It pulled all the
radicals to their side. It was a revolution about human rights, not about
religion. Khomeini rode that bandwagon into power.
JUAN GONZALEZ: The book’s title, Torture and
Democracy, would seem to be, at first glance, at least, contradictory
terms. But it’s a major premise of the book.
DARIUS REJALI: It’s true. I mean, we don’t
normally think of democracies as having much to do with torture. After all,
the people vote the politicians; they don’t like to be tortured. So if
someone tortures them, it won’t happen that way. Or if we think that
democracies are just bargains between people, elites, Republicans and
Democrats, basically the idea is, you don’t torture me, I don’t torture
you when we’re in power, and then all will be fine. Historically, of course,
torture has always happened in democracies. The Greeks and Romans, the
Renaissance republics, all—even Britain, France and America were torturing
in their colonies well before World War II. Long before the CIA existed, these
techniques all happened.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And why had, historically, that
happened?
DARIUS REJALI: Well, there are three reasons why
torture happens in democracies. The one that obviously is going to occur to
you is national emergency situations, right? But there are two other reasons.
One is, basically, torture is sometimes and often a local arrangement between
local businessmen and the cops, like in Chicago, where Commander Burge and a
whole number of other detectives were implicated in torturing, or allegedly
so, roughly from ’72 to ’94. This wasn’t because there was a perceived
or emergency threat; these people wanted false confessions to convict people.
And they basically corrupted the judicial system. Governor Ryan, a Republican,
had to suspend the death penalty, because there were so many false confessions
within the system. He couldn’t tell how.
The other things that torture is connected to is long periods of detention and
when judges and juries outright value confessions far more than they should.
In Japan, for example, 86 percent of all crimes end with a full confession by
the accused, which is really high compared to, say, our rates. And whenever
cops—whenever juries and judges basically say we need to have confessions,
cops will get it any way they can.
AMY GOODMAN: What is your reaction to Bush’s
veto and the Republican upholding of the veto against making everyone go by
the same Army training manual, whether they’re CIA or military, around the
issue of torture?
DARIUS REJALI: I have two reactions. The first one
is that whenever you create parallel systems—one group of people can
torture, the other person can’t—what happens is that torture creeps across
that line. It’s a very sharp, corrosive practice. I mean, just think about
this. You’re an Army interrogator, and you’re supposed to use grade-B
practices, where the guys on the other side can use grade-A practices, and you
think it works, right? So what’s going to prevent you from using those
practices?
Another kind of thing that my book documents is that many of these practices,
whether you call them torture or not, are clean. They don’t leave marks, so
they’re very hard to trace, very hard to hold people accountable for. So,
very quickly—
JUAN GONZALEZ: And you say that’s a particular
characteristic that’s been perfected by democracies, more so than
dictatorships?
DARIUS REJALI: Those kinds of practices first
emerged within democracies because of the high levels of public monitoring,
right? And dictatorships, for most of known history, if they used water, they
preferred to boil people. They didn’t use tepid water. Waterboarding is kind
of our thing. And it’s very rare to find in ancient history people who used
techniques that don’t leave marks. But as the number of church groups, as
the number of human rights groups, as the press people become much more
active, the police move increasingly towards cleaner techniques. And that
happens in democracies, because our civil societies are stronger, first. So,
basically, the line in my book is quite simple: when we’re watching, the
cops get sneaky. And it happens whether it’s international or domestic. And
that’s always a real problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Vice President Cheney said a few
years ago a dunk in water, referring to waterboarding, saying, “it’s a
no-brainer for me” if it can save lives.
DARIUS REJALI: Well, look, again, I go back to the
Shah. I remember the Shah of Iran also did peekaboo politics, where he would
say, “Well, we don’t torture. We just have like this way and that way, and
it saves lives, right?” Look, no one knows how many people this saves lives.
As a historian, I can tell you what the rate is when I look at other cases
where armies very selectively tried to get suspects. And the best rate results
that you can get when you use these techniques, at least as much as I’ve
been able to find, is you pretty much have to first arrest minimally 8,000 to
20,000 suspects. You have to torture all of them. And out of that number, you’re
going to get twenty to seventy-eight innocents that you have to torture for
every one bad guy you get. And that’s a really bad rate.
The other thing I just want to say on this point is this. We don’t know how
many lives torture has saved, but all of us know how many lives torture has
taken, because we know that much of the information that started this war was
gotten through coerced information, and we know that much of the war—the
threat this war was prosecuted by was done through coerced information. It was
the torture of [Ibn] al-Shaykh al-Libi who told us that it was Saddam Hussein
who was training al-Qaeda in biological and chemical weapons, a claim that the
Pentagon yesterday finally confirmed was utterly false. Well, that went into
the President’s speech in October 2002 and was part of the main
justification that took us to war. Every American military death in this war,
every civilian death, every limb and leg that was lost was a life that torture
took. In the end, if we’re going to talk about the value and the balance of
these things, whether torture is immoral, we have to weigh all those things
against the lives torture saved.
JUAN GONZALEZ: You make it clear, obviously, that
the United States is not alone, that, as you say, many other democracies or
empire democracies, in effect—England, France and these others—also
practiced torture. But now you’re seeing the United States almost alone in
terms of how it’s regarded, even by some of these other countries. Your
sense of the international standing of the United States in this analysis of
torture now?
DARIUS REJALI: Well, there’s no question that
America’s standing has taken a hit in symbolic terms, but it’s also taken
a hit in very practical terms. We know the thing that works best for getting
intelligence. We know there are people out there who want to hurt us. And the
thing that works best in getting intelligence is public cooperation. And when
you torture, you not only just get bad intelligence, you undermine the
willingness of loyal Muslims or people who like America to come forward and
help us.
My favorite example of this, just so you understand, July 21st, a bunch of
guys got on buses in London with bombs, and they escaped. The British police
got them all in ten days, and the break in the case came when the parents of
Muktar Said Ibrahim, loyal British Muslims, turned in their son when they saw
the security video. Would they have turned him if they knew their son was
going to be tortured? The answer is: obviously not. Right? We know the kinds
of things that work in policing. The FBI knows it. This is a standard
practice. And the more we torture, the less it is that people will surrender
to us. Getting into a terrorist organization is not unlike trying to get into
the Mafia. You want people to walk in, turn sides on us, be our inside moles.
That’s the way it works.
AMY GOODMAN: Professor Rejali, talk about tasering.
How do you—how does that fit into the spectrum of torture?
DARIUS REJALI: You know, one of the very important
points I want to make in my book is that I know we’re all focused on
international torture, but there is no sharp line between domestic and
international torture. Practices that start in our prisons go out into the
field. Practices in the field come back to us.
We all know what waterboarding is. What we forget is that waterboarding was a
technique that, although it was learned in the Philippines—we’ve all seen
the New Yorker article, I’m sure, on how that happened—those soldiers,
when they come back, what kind of jobs do they get? They get jobs as
policemen. They get jobs as private security people. And very soon, in the
1920s, all those techniques from the Philippine war started appearing all
across the United States. They were used on conscientious objectors during
World War I. The techniques that appeared in Chicago in ’72 to ’92 were
all techniques that we have already documented in Vietnam that MPs were quite
familiar with, right? So, after every war, people come back.
Tasers moved from domestic policing here, they’ve been out there in Iraq. We
have a number of cases where people allege that they were tortured with the
use of tasers. And the problem with tasers—the problem with any kind of
device that doesn’t leave marks is this: if we’re going to use violence in
a democracy, there has to be third-party accountability. It just can’t be
that you take the cops’ word for it, right? There’s got to be a way in
which somebody can say, “Hmm, let me look at that tape again and see if you
properly used mace or that baton or something.” And with electrical weapons
that leave very few marks, it’s very hard to know.
I always ask people, during the Rodney King video, which everybody saw, “Does
everyone remember it?” And everyone says, “Yeah.” And ehtn I say, “Well,
how much electroshock did he get when that video was running?” And everyone
goes, “I don’t remember anything. There was just beating.” I was like,
“No, he had a taser in him. He had gotten two bolts of 50,000 volts, and
they were emptying out the remains of that charge in him while he was
struggling.” Now, everybody can get outraged by violence they can see.
Violence they can’t see, we barely have the opportunity even to raise the
question.
JUAN GONZALEZ: What about the conflict, the debate
within law enforcement in the United States on these issues? Is there a
significant, strong counterforce against the use of these kinds of techniques?
DARIUS REJALI: Well, I think that law enforcement
looks very hard for non-lethal ways to exercise their power in a way that can
be accountable and as minimal as possible. And there’s no question that
tasers—and not so much stun guns, but tasers, for sure—there are cases
where they’ve saved lives. Some of the taser companies now begin to
understand that these are problems, so they’ve mounted their tasers with
computer-to-digital chips that will determine when it was used. They sometimes
have video cameras that allow you to actually see what the policeman was
doing.
And I think that data collection is important, because it allows for
third-party monitoring by human rights groups and stuff. But that data
monitoring is only as good as how centralized this collection process is. I
know that recently the British police want to put little cameras on the little—on
the big round cop—you know, those bucket helmets that all the British police
use. They now all have little helmet cameras so that people can watch them.
But I’ll tell you, if I wanted to do something nasty, I’d make sure my
helmet broke.
AMY GOODMAN: Darius Rejali, you talk about
psychological torture and the references to it as “torture lite.”
DARIUS REJALI: Well, I mean, I think “psychological”
is a word that’s used a lot in a different set of contexts. Torture lite is
called psychological often because it leaves no marks. But these are actually
physical techniques. Sleep deprivation isn’t just depriving people of their
naps. One of the things that we know about sleep deprivation is through
experiments. And, by the way, this isn’t because of torture; it’s because
most of America lives sleeplessly. And we all know how—and it affects our
judgment and all sorts of things. And psychologists have studied it. And what
we know is that it produces sharp pains in all your muscular joints, starting
with your legs, going all the way up. It also makes you extremely sensitive to
chemical heat and electrical stimuli. In other words, all other tortures hurt
more when you have less sleep. And so, it’s an ideal technique that
torturers always combine with stress and duress techniques and all these other
things. It’s not psychological. Just because a technique doesn’t leave
marks doesn’t mean it’s psychological. There are ways that I can strike
you with my bare hands that would leave a bruise. There are other ways that I
could strike you with my hand which wouldn’t leave a bruise at all, no
matter how many times I did it. And frankly, it would be a mistake to call one
technique psychological and the other one physical.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Finally—we have less than a
minute—I’d just like to ask you, for those Americans who see the
possibility of—what can be done about this for themselves? What would you
suggest?
DARIUS REJALI: Well, first of all, one of the good
pieces of news about my book is that torturers actually care what human rights
groups and church groups do. You may not think writing that check out to Human
Rights Watch or Amnesty or so forth really works, but the reality is this: if
torturers didn’t care about human rights monitoring, they would actually not
be clean. They’d be using these scarring techniques. President Bush would be
talking about torture all the time, right? And the other part of this is, we
know that they hunt down human rights lawyers and doctors who catch these
things, so they care. So don’t give up. This is really our best chance of a
world without torture.
AMY GOODMAN: Darius Rejali, I want to thank you
for being with us. Torture and Democracy is this tome of a book, and we
thank you so much for joining us, Professor at Reed College.
DARIUS REJALI: It was a pleasure being here. Thank
you.
source:
15apr2008
Scholar Darius Rejali Details the History and Scope of Modern Torture As
the ACLU calls on Congress to appoint an independent prosecutor to
investigate the Bush administration’s approval of torture, we speak with
Darius Rejali, a renowned expert on the history and politics of torture. He
is professor of political science at Reed College and author of a new book
called Torture and Democracy.
Guest: Darius Rejali, professor of political science at Reed
College and author of the new book, Torture and Democracy. His other
books include Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Modern
Iran.
MP3
Download
AMY GOODMAN: On Capitol Hill, we hear that the
congresspeople are talking about taxes. We also, today, turn to the issue of
torture, an issue that has been out there now for the last few weeks. The ACLU
is calling on Congress to appoint an independent prosecutor to investigate the
Bush administration’s approval of torture. The call comes after President
Bush admitted Friday he was aware that top administration officials had
personally discussed and approved the CIA’s use of brutal interrogation
techniques on suspects in the so-called “war on terror.” He told ABC News,
“I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved. I
don’t know what’s new about that. I’m not so sure what’s so startling
about that," he said.
Well, last week, ABC News revealed a Principals Committee on the National
Security Council agreed on controversial interrogation techniques, including
physical assault, sleep deprivation and waterboarding. The officials involved
included Vice President Dick Cheney, then-National Security Adviser
Condoleezza Rice, then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and then-Secretary of
State Colin Powell.
ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero said, "We have always known that
the CIA’s use of torture was approved from the very top levels of the US
government, yet the latest revelations about knowledge from the President
himself and authorization from his top advisers only confirms our worst fears.”
Romero went on to say, “It is a very sad day when the President of the
United States subverts the Constitution, the rule of law and American values
of justice.”
Well, Darius Rejali is a renowned expert on the history and politics of
torture. He’s a professor of political science at Reed College here in
Oregon and author of a new book called Torture and Democracy, joining
us here in Portland. Welcome to Democracy Now!
DARIUS REJALI: Good morning. It’s good to be
here.
AMY GOODMAN: It was great to have you in New York.
Now, these latest revelations, what is your response, Professor Rejali?
DARIUS REJALI: Well, I mean, they fall under the
doctrine of command responsibility; that is to say, moral culpability lies
with people who know that something is happening or should have known that
something is happening under their command and had the power to stop it. So,
typically under war crimes trials and things of this sort, this doctrine has
been evoked quite a bit. So, first of all, on the moral side, that’s the
issue.
Actually, the interesting thing for me on the political side is that it doesn’t
fit any of the two models we thought were happening in the White House. One of
the models was that there was this kind of—this is a more conservative
argument—a slippery slope: people sent mixed messages, and then people went
on to torture. And then, the other model is the Mafia model, the wink-wink,
nod-nod model: just get it done, I don’t care how. It turns out, actually,
that there were not only demonstrations, but also that the policymakers that
were key to this wanted a legal cover. And so, they cared enough about the
rule of law—this is the silver lining, if you want—that they actually went
to lawyers and had them write a cover, which means that sort of on the—this
is sort of central to the thesis of Torture and Democracy—when
democracies torture, they always try and do it under the cover of law, and
they try and do it in such a way that appears that no torture is actually
happening, leaving torture techniques that leave no marks and things that
really make it difficult for victims to come forward credibly.
AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that difference—it’s
just an odd phrase to say “when democracies torture”—but the difference
between torture in democracies and not democracies.
DARIUS REJALI: Yeah. Most people think that, well,
logically, democracies are unlikely to torture, because they’re bargains of
leniency—people don’t like to be tortured, they elect their rulers, rulers
don’t torture them—whereas in authoritarian states, they can torture them
as much as they want, because the people don’t control power.
In fact, it’s a little different than that. Authoritarian states indeed use
scarring techniques, techniques—they don’t particularly care if they leave
bloody marks or if journalists report or other sorts of things, because they
can stop them. In democracies where there’s a minimal civil society, where
people watch their government, whether they’re church groups or whether they’re
newspaper organizations or human rights organizations, then whether it’s
your local government, your local police or your national government, they try
to use cleaner techniques. And by this, I mean techniques that leave very few
marks. I mean, the list of techniques that you read earlier—sleep
deprivation, various forms of stress positions, waterboarding—these are all
techniques that are actually kind of rare in human history up until the
nineteenth century, where we find them appearing first in democracies and then
spreading—
AMY GOODMAN: Like where?
DARIUS REJALI: Well, waterboarding—well, let’s
say electrotorture, the most famous of these, is—first appears in the United
States in the 1908. Emma Goldman was—documented the very first
electrotorture device in American prisons, the famous anarchist writer. 1908,
she documented something called the “humming bird,” which was a device
that probably hummed with electricity, which was used in New York prisons. So
it’s very, very early on that we start using these things.
AMY GOODMAN: I mean, in terms of torture, you go
back to slavery.
DARIUS REJALI: Yes, certainly slavery existed.
What’s really interesting about slavery is that there were two types of
techniques in—among slavers. There were techniques that left marks. Most
people think that slavery is about whipping and those things. That mostly
pertained to owners. But dealers, to sell slaves, had to leave no marks on
their slaves, because that would affect the price. So what we find—what’s
very interesting is that the techniques that slave dealers were using start
becoming much more common, and the police start adopting them in the United
States starting in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century. And they
become common interrogation techniques in the ’20s and ’30s.
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what happens to a
society that has engaged in torture?
DARIUS REJALI: Yeah. There’s always blowback.
There’s always blowback. One of the things that definitely happens is that,
particularly if the torture happens in a foreign war, is that the soldiers
come back, and those who have been involved in torture get involved in usually
security activities, policing or private security. And what then happens is
that they use the same techniques to get ahead that they did in the war.
Torture has a twenty-year shadow, it appears. That is to say, the reason we
all know waterboarding, for example, isn’t because we had waterboarding from
the early days; it’s because the soldiers who came back from the Philippine
insurgency war in 1902 all brought it back to the United States, and then this
technique started appearing all over the United States, particularly in the
South and against conscientious objectors during the World War I.
So—and the same thing happened in Chicago. We have—one of the biggest
torture crises of recently years was the torture crisis in Chicago, which
involved hundreds of victims and including people who were forced to confess
and were condemned to death row. And—
AMY GOODMAN: You’re talking about the police
commander, Jon Burge—
DARIUS REJALI: Jon Burge
AMY GOODMAN: —and the prisoners forced to
so-called confess, end up being taken off of death row now, and say that they
were tortured—
DARIUS REJALI: That is correct.
AMY GOODMAN: —and now the documentation is
there.
DARIUS REJALI: There are many other cases that
will soon probably come into that whole discussion. The main point is that the
torture techniques that were used by police in those circumstances were
torture techniques that were first documented in southern Vietnam during the
Vietnam War. So somebody brought these back. And so, I mean, the thing is that
the torture techniques in this war are likely to appear in a neighborhood near
you sometime in the next twenty years, and that’s one of the most serious
blowbacks of this.
AMY GOODMAN: What about the INS, the Immigration
and Naturalization Service? What happens to immigrants in detention centers?
DARIUS REJALI: Well, certainly we know that in
some cases the techniques that appeared in the Iraq war—
AMY GOODMAN: It is now known as ICE, by the way.
DARIUS REJALI: ICE?
AMY GOODMAN: Right, no longer INS—
DARIUS REJALI: INS, I see.
AMY GOODMAN: —Immigration and Naturalization
Service.
DARIUS REJALI: OK. Well, we know that the
techniques that appeared in those kinds of detention centers often preceded
the ones that happened in the Iraq theater. In other words, the techniques of
torture, they don’t respect borders. They don’t need passports. They flow
out, and they come back in. And, you know, this is one of the points I often
make to people. The line between domestic and international policing is a very
thin one, and that you can’t really anticipate where these things are going
to show up. And INS prisons, or ICE prisons, I guess, now are less—as far as
I know, they’re less regulated in some ways than—
AMY GOODMAN: There’s also the for-profit
prisons.
DARIUS REJALI: Yeah, there’s the for-profit
perspective, too, absolutely. And that’s also true in the war theater. That
is to say, increasingly in the future, all the wars that we are likely to
engage in are going to be asymmetric wars with counterinsurgency forces, and
given that we have a press and all this human rights monitoring, it’s likely
that interrogation itself will be privatized and has been for some time.
Now, the positive side of this is, presumably, that if you can—if you’re
privatizing interrogation, you can also get civil liability. That is to say,
that instead of trying people for criminal charges, you can get actual
compensation from victims. I expect we’re going to—for victims. So I
expect we’ll see many more suits against corporations saying that, well, you
know, if you’re going to do this, then you need to pay up.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, just a brief history—it’s
hard to talk about the word “brief” with this monumental book, Torture
and Democracy, but a brief history of torture. I remember right around the
time of the invasion, at the Pentagon, Rumsfeld was telling people to watch
the film The Battle of Algiers. But go back in time.
DARIUS REJALI: Well, for me, the history of
torture begins with basically the amnesia that starts at the end of World War
II, when we forget that our societies and democracies tortured. We tended to
think of torture as something tied to the Inquisition.
But here’s basically the story. In the nineteenth century, for a variety of
reasons, we were capable of controlling torture, and we actually put an end to
most torture in Europe. But it didn’t stop in the colonies of states, and it
didn’t stop in the more distant and other parts of our countries. In the
twentieth century, after World War II, this stuff rolls back. In France, in
the Battle of Algiers, famously, the French started using torture, and it was
claimed to be effective. Sadly, I mean, now that we actually know the data for
the Battle of Algiers, it’s a disaster, right? They issued 24,000 torture
warrants for probably less than 1,400 guerrillas. In other words, they
tortured about twenty innocent people for each accurate person that they got.
And this is kind of normal.
Torture is actually the clumsiest method that one could possibly use—and
this is not me; this is the Japanese fascist police, the Kempeitai—to gather
information. It’s worse than anything else you could use. But around the
Battle of Algiers, a myth developed, that you could in fact somehow use
torture to make it work. And the movie The Battle of Algiers, unfortunately,
kind of helped that, because it didn’t really catch the fact that most of
the information the French got came from standard police files and public
cooperation and informers, which is what we know normally happens with police
forces. But, I mean, if you look at the movie The Battle of Algiers, you don’t
see any informers in it, except for the very first part of it. So there’s a
general kind of mythology about torture, that it’s somehow effective, that
it worked for the Gestapo, which it didn’t any more than it worked for the
French.
But somehow we think—and this is the bottom line—that democracy makes us
weak and that torture makes the man. And that’s just not true. Basically,
what we know is that the standard policing procedures that democracies use,
which require heavy public cooperation—if you don’t have public
cooperation, the chances that you’ll identify a crime or identify a
guerrilla or a terrorist fall to less than ten percent. I mean, these are huge
studies that show this. Torture is not going to solve that problem.
AMY GOODMAN: Darius Rejali, I want to thank you
for being with us once again, but here in your hometown of Portland, Oregon. Torture
and Democracy is his book. Professor Rejali teaches political science at
Reed College. Thank you.
DARIUS REJALI: Nice to be here.
source:
15apr2008
