By Brendan Sweeney
Darius Rejali, professor of political science at Reed College, is a nationally recognized expert on government torture and interrogation. Iranian-born, Rejali has spent his scholarly career reflecting on violence, and especially on the causes, consequences, and meaning of modern torture in our world.
In Torture and Democracy (Princeton, 2007), Darius Rejali’s most recent book, he carries out an unrelenting examination of the use of torture by democracies in the 20th century. As democracy, human rights, and the free press blossomed after World War II, so did the market for “clean” torture techniques that leave no scars, such as the use of drugs, stress positions, and waterboarding. Rejali reveals the most controversial Western intelligence-gathering techniques, explains their origins, and questions if their use actually hinders the torturer’s ability to gather credible intelligence.
Torture and Democracy won the 2007 Human Rights Book of the Year Award from the American Political Science Association and the biennial 2009 Raphael Lemkin Award from the Institute for the Study of Genocide, New York, for the best non-fiction work in English which addresses the causes of genocide and crimes against humanity.
In 2009, the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board awarded Darius Rejali with the Danish Distinguished Chair in Human Rights and International Studies. Awards in the Fulbright Distinguished Chairs Program are among the most prestigious appointments in the Fulbright Scholar Program. The Danish Distinguished Chair is a research award at the Danish Centre for International Studies and Human Rights (DCISM), DIHR’s main partner organisation.
Q: Could you tell us a little about your research and your background?
A: Well, I’m an Iranian-American. My research began with my PhD work on the history of torture in Iran and it is still pretty much the main text on that. That got me into the subject of how violence perpetuates itself not in Iranian history but who the torturers were. We knew a great deal about victims but not much about the torturers. I was part of a group of scholars in the 1980s who looked at how torture occurred within the practice of modernization. But then I became interested in the third component; besides victims and violators, there is always technology, so I became interested in doing a study of the technology and in the end electrical technology. Then I developed the thesis which became Torture and Democracy.
Q: One of the interesting things about your book, Torture and Democracy, is that you put forward a thesis that it is actually the democratic countries in the 20th century that led the way in developing torture methods.
A: Yes, clean torture.
Q: How did this happen? People tend to connect torture with autocratic or totalitarian regimes.
A: Most people think that most modern torture comes from Nazis and Stalinists, and certainly those states deserve their incredibly nasty reputations, and it’s also the case that much of the historical record we do find autocratic states doing terrible things. However, you cannot say that democracies have no history of torture; they just have an alternative history of torture, a different history. This history involves elements that are particular to them, for example human rights, or what we would call protection rights for the individual. As concern for these things became more salient among publics and governments police who wanted to torture had to be considerably cleaner. The advantage of a clean technique is that it interrupts communication between victims and the public and people don’t get easily upset. ‘Clean’ tortures first appeared in democratic states and then as you go into a world where democracies set the pace in terms of international human rights monitoring authoritarian states realized that if they wanted to get aid or achieve legitimacy they also needed to be cleaner. So the more dependent the authoritarian state, the cleaner its techniques tend to be. Democracies that are dependent are also typically ‘clean’. It’s about the incentives the police have.
Q: What do you mean exactly by ‘clean’ technologies?
A: A pretty obvious one is electricity. No torturer would want to use electricity. For one thing it kills, whereas whipping someone usually doesn’t. So there had to be a tremendous amount of incentives for torturers to go through the engineering steps to adapt electrical technology. This happens very early on well before the Nazis, long before the Stalinists. The first electro-torturing state was the USA and the first recorded example was a device called ‘the humming bird’ that was used in New York state prisons in 1908. Another device was ‘the electric monkey’ in Seattle which was a cell with an electrified floor used to get confessions, and ‘the electric monkey’ in Dallas in 1917, which was used primarily on African Americans. This technology appears first – and this is often forgotten – within democratic states. Its utility then becomes obvious to authoritarian states and so as human rights monitoring increases, they too start becoming electro-torturers.
Q: When torture becomes high-tech, does this make it easier to legitimize?
A: There are two answers to that. In the early stages, no, because most of the electrical torture that was done was done using field batteries and field telephones and stuff like that which didn’t add any legitimacy to the practice. It does make it difficult to stop because you cannot for instance deprive a military unit of its field telephone. But there are forms of clean torture which depend very heavily on their perceived legitimacy. The most obvious one is drugs. However, we’ve reached the point where we can determine if drugs were used, what drugs were administered and when. The great golden age of pharmaceutical torture was in the 1970s where there were no tests. Since then it has been disappearing in every context save one; which is in medical prisons where dissidents may be diagnosed as having sluggish schizophrenia. In some countries just the fact that you are a dissident means that there’s something weird about you, and the result is that an horrific drug regimen is prescribed that is appropriate for certain kinds of medical treatment but not for others. We found this problem first in the Soviet Union and now it’s an issue in China and Cuba and similar states.
Q: First, the debate about waterboarding in the USA. It seems the goalposts have moved as to what is allowed since 9/11; methods are used which wouldn’t previously have been contemplated. And second: is it effective in any way? The notion that you can save a million lives by torturing someone; is that complete myth?
A: Not a complete myth. Let me take the second part of your question first. During the entire Bush presidential period if you asked ordinary Americans or Europeans if there is a ticking-bomb scenario where does their opinion lie on torture, most people said that there would be a huge majority in favour of torture under those circumstances. In fact there have been 30 polls since 2001 on this: they have run a battery of these tests and have named the techniques by name, waterboarding electrical torture and the results are these; there has never been throughout the entire period of the Bush administration a pro-torture American majority. The opposition to torture was lower than in Europe – European opposition to torture is about 70-80 per cent – whereas American opposition is between 55 and 65 per cent according to the polls. When specifically asked if you would waterboard or carry out electro-torture to save the country from imminent disaster, 80 per cent of Americans say no. This is also true of polls in the US army serving in Iraq where the majority of Marines and the majority of soldiers also refused to do this even if it saved the lives of their buddies. It is important to recognize that where the American public is on this question is not where it is perceived to have been. This phenomenon is called false consensus. Just last year we asked people; where do you stand on this question and where do you think the average American stands? Those people who thought that torture was never likely to be approved had the best understanding of what the actual distribution was, whereas people who are pro-torture thought that 80 per cent of Americans agreed with them.
Q: So only a small minority approves of torture in the United States?
A: Yes, it’s a very small minority that misperceives things. Now that has changed since the Obama administration has taken power. Thanks to [former US Vice President] Dick Cheney. Before whether you were pro- or anti-torture didn’t correlate with whether you were a Democrat or a Republican, but now a majority of Republicans support some sort of torture. But even among Republicans 70 per cent are against waterboarding. So they’re very confused.
No one can say that torture never works though. Torture works best in peacetime and not in emergency situations. The problem with torture isn’t that it doesn’t sometimes work; the problem is that it has an absolutely horrendous error rate and if the point of justifying torture is that it saves innocent lives, the data shows - in the few cases where we have statistics - that it takes far more innocent lives than it ever saves. As for the American case, we don’t really know. I’m still looking forward to seeing the data on the CIA claims. Can we tally up the numbers, how many people were saved as opposed to how many lives were taken? This much is certain; none of us knows how many lives have been saved by waterboarding, but we can say how many lives were taken because we know that a significant chunk of the intelligence that let America into the war in Iraq and Afghanistan - particularly in Iraq - was through coerced interrogation.
Q: What about prevention worldwide? How can we know what’s going in states that are opaque where we have no idea what’s going on behind prison walls?
A: Well the rules for prevention are fairly clear, and are not tied to being a democratic state. Your question presupposes that it would be nice if states were democratic, but even authoritarian states can recognize that an efficient police system with significant public cooperation is the most effective way to maintain public order. So not surprisingly there are some authoritarian states who got it. So for example Czechoslovakia during the last 25 year of its communist period was an authoritarian regime, but Amnesty never recorded torture there. It has to do with factors other than authoritarianism, for example, where there are high levels of ethnic conflict or rapid economic modernization or tremendous socio-economic tensions. Where states are going through transitions, that’s when you get genocide and torture. For prevention work to actually have an effect you have to be able to intervene under those conditions.
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