快猫短视频

After a career studying how and why people torture prisoners, Darius Rejali says he is left with a 鈥渄eep, haunted feeling鈥�. He tells Michael Bond how torture is thriving in modern democracies, and how the rise of human rights monitoring has forced interrogators to refine their techniques to make it harder to spot.

You grew up in Iran. Was torture common there?

Iran has a long history of torture. It was never discussed, but everybody knew it happened. The Shah wanted people to know that bad things would happen to them if they opposed him. My father was involved in politics; some of his friends were interrogated by the secret police and others died mysteriously.

Were any of your family involved in torture?

My great-grandfather, who was governor-general of the province of Khorasan, didn鈥檛 hesitate to torture people or turn cannons on crowds. This was part of his way of defending his world. I think there are many like me with ancestors who were involved in heinous acts of violence, and it鈥檚 important that we come forward and talk about it.

Did growing up with that proximity to violence influence what you do now?

It did make me feel I was different in some respects. I remember learning in high school about an Iranian king who had conquered a city and then removed 10,000 eyes from his enemies. The other students were horrified but I was interested in why he chose eyes. He could have chosen hands or noses or heads. As I grew up, I realised I could go to dark places that nobody else wanted to go to and come back with relatively coherent stories to tell.

You are concerned with 鈥渃lean torture鈥�. What is it?

These are techniques that involve intense pain but leave little in the way of bruises or other telltale signs. For example, if you hit someone with a whip, there will always be a scar, but if you hit them with the flat of the hand the bruise will clear in one or two weeks. After that it is very difficult to prove that the victim has been beaten.

What kind of techniques are you talking about?

The most famous is electro-torture. What makes it horrible is that electricity seizes you from within; it feels as if it鈥檚 attacking your mind. When used properly it will leave very few marks. Other clean methods include beating with instruments such as sand-filled piping. Water tortures such as water-boarding 鈥� there鈥檚 no question that this has happened in the US. Positional tortures such as forced standing. Choking. The use of drugs. Sleep deprivation. And the use of loud noise.

How common are these methods today?

They have become much more common in democracies since the start of the 1970s with the rise of a human rights monitoring regime. When people are watching, police get sneaky. Electro-torture was relatively rare, then from the 1960s the number of countries using it doubled almost every decade. Once you have a free press, a government that depends on the consent of the people cannot afford to have the kind of bad publicity that comes from scarred victims. It turns to clean techniques.

Where do they come from?

The techniques migrate. Every time Americans have been involved in a war where there has been torture, those techniques have come back to local or private policing, since that is where military policemen get jobs. There is migration the other way too: techniques used by US military policemen in Iraq had been recorded in immigration and naturalisation prisons in Miami in the 1990s. Most often, torture techniques originate not in some deep vault in the CIA but in dark parts of our society where they are tolerated. They live in barracks and fraternities and university pranks and movies. Hence most torture is not sophisticated: electricity is about as sophisticated as it gets.

Why is torture so hard to control?

Usually the top authorises it and the bottom delivers. Then it鈥檚 a slippery slope as torturers quickly become less responsive to centralised authority. One reason is competition between interrogators. When policemen track down information, they cooperate. In torture it鈥檚 different. The guy who breaks the prisoner gets the reward. If you were the guy softening him up, would you hand him over for the next guy to get all the glory? Torturers adopt new techniques and become more vicious in the hope they can break their prisoner.

Torturers also suffer traumatic stress themselves. It screws everybody up and it takes a long time to undo that damage. I fear the US is well on that path.

Is there such a thing as a science of torture?

If there were, then torture should be producing accurate information regularly. Each interrogator would know exactly how much pain to apply to get a person to break. But pain cannot be measured in the way people think. Typically interrogators know two things about pain. The first is that people have different sensitivities to different kinds of pain, and it is unpredictable which kind they are more sensitive to. The second is that over time a person becomes desensitised to pain. Sooner or later they don鈥檛 feel anything. So torturers take a scatter-shot approach, try a wide variety of techniques, then ratchet it up as fast and early as they can, hoping to overtake the pain threshold of their victim. You wouldn鈥檛 have to do that if there were a science of torture.

How often do interrogators obtain useful information or truthful confessions using torture?

The few statistical studies on this suggest the return is incredibly poor. There are several reasons. How do you know you have the right person? And even if you do, how do you know they鈥檙e telling the truth? Third, torture can damage the brain, and anything that affects the brain鈥檚 capacity to withhold information also affects its capacity to retrieve it.

If it doesn鈥檛 work, why does it persist?

Myths and rumours. There is a perception that democracy makes us weak and only 鈥渞eal men鈥� know how to do this stuff. People think torture worked for the Gestapo, for example. It didn鈥檛. What made the Gestapo so scarily efficient was its dependence on public cooperation. Informers betrayed the resistance repeatedly in Europe, and everyone knew this, but it was more convenient to say the Gestapo got the truth by beating it out of us. Public cooperation is the best way to gather information. After the failed bomb attacks in London in 2005, the British police found every one of the gang within a week. One was caught after his parents turned him in. They would not have done that if they鈥檇 thought he鈥檇 be tortured.

How would you stop torture?

If you have strong leadership and clear punishment for infractions and good protection for whistle-blowers, you can get rid of most organised torture. The problem is when the government turns a blind eye.

You study a dark subject. How do you manage not to be dragged down by it?

I have a vast support system. I also do things outside my work, such as music, sports and travel. Anybody who puts cruelty first in their lives is open to misanthropy. They can become frustrated with how stupid other people can be. To protect yourself against that, you have to learn to be dependent, to be vulnerable, because the tendency is to want to withdraw. I wouldn鈥檛 want to suggest that I don鈥檛 get any ill effects from writing about torture. I have had many dreams about the things I had to encounter in writing this book. I walk in ghosts and shadows. I have this deep, haunted feeling all the time. It never leaves me, but it鈥檚 a good thing to have those feelings.