The Big Book of Pain: Torture & Punishment Through History (47 page)

Like any bad habit, the use of torture increases with familiarity. As with alcohol, drugs, tobacco and so many other things which are bad for us, the more accustomed to torture a nation becomes the greater its tolerance for it. No one simply steps out of their car one day and decides to beat their neighbours to death. Depending upon your particular neighbour you might occasionally think about it, but you don’t. Why? Because it is not acceptable behaviour of civilised people living in a civilised society. Even seriously contemplating such a thing is revolting. So how do people become so desensitised to the horrors of torture that they not only tacitly accept, but actively engage in, the physical mutilation and execution of other human beings? How long does it take to become a monster? Certainly the German people were just like the rest of us in 1930, but by 1939 those who were not directly engaged in the wholesale slaughter of millions upon millions of people gave their complete and (generally) unconditional support to those who did. Did they really know what was happening? While they might have turned a blind eye to those cattle-car-loads of Jews disappearing into the distance it would have been impossible to miss the decimation of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Belgium, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. So how does such a thing happen? How do civilised people become so convinced that their neighbours are sub-human threats to all that is good and right, that they themselves descend to the state of ravening animals?

In search of an answer to this question, in 1963 Yale Professor of Psychology, Stanley Milgram, set up an experiment to see if the guards at Nazi concentration camps were ‘only following orders’ as they claimed at the Nuremburg War Crimes Trials in 1946 and ‘47, or if there was something far more sinister at work. Milgram’s experiment involved a group of his students who were assigned to ask a series of questions to outside volunteers. When the volunteers gave a wrong answer the student examiner was told to administer a mild electrical shock. Each time the subject gave an incorrect answer the voltage was to be increased. Despite the subjects writhing and screaming in pain – some pleading that they had heart conditions and could die from the shocks – more than 50 per cent of the students continued to ask the entire slate of questions and administer the punishment as instructed. Only later were the students told that their victims were actually actors, and that the effects of the supposed electrical shocks had been faked. If the idea that such educated people as a group of Yale University students would knowingly threaten the health and lives of innocent people simply because they were ordered to do so is frightening, the results of a subsequent experiment had far more ominous implications.

Stanley Milgram, pictured here with the ‘electric generator’ he used in the Interaction Laboratory at the University of Yale, in an experiment into human obedience.

In August 1971, social psychologist and Stanford University Professor Philip Zimbardo carried out what has since become known as the Stanford Prison Experiment. In the experiment, Zimbardo assigned a random group of student volunteers to play the parts of either prison guards or, alternatively, of prisoners. Under the carefully laid out parameters of the experiment the students were to live for several weeks in a simulated prison-like building fitted with all the standard accoutrements of any real prison. The ‘guards’ were given official-looking uniforms and mirror-finished sun glasses to mask their eyes. This same eye-disguising technique has long been used by American policemen and Highway Patrol officers. The prisoners were dressed in standard, bright orange, prison-style jumpsuits. Zimbardo’s motive in setting up this experiment was to find out, in his own words, ‘If you put good people in a bad place do the people triumph or does the place corrupt them?’

The outcome of the experiment not only flew in the face of reason, but was worse than anything either Zimbardo, or undoubtedly the student volunteers, could ever have imagined. At the end of the first week the experiment was terminated when, according to Zimbardo: ‘I witnessed naked, shackled prisoners with bags over their heads, guards stepping on prisoners’ backs as they did pushups, guards sexually humiliating prisoners.’ Three decades later Zimbardo would recall: ‘Some images from my experiment are practically interchangeable with those from Iraq.’ What Zimbardo also found, as would be discovered in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib fiasco, was that the incidences of abuse increased significantly at night, after those in authority had gone home.

From the disastrous outcome of the above two experiments we must conclude two things. First, people, no matter how benign and well educated they may be, are capable of horrible things when ordered to do so. Secondly, people will repeatedly commit singularly savage acts if they think they can get away with them; that is, when they believe they are not being watched.

Comparing the actions of nice, upper-middle-class students from Stanford and Yale with the atrocities committed by Spanish Inquisitors, witch hunters and Nazi concentration camp guards may seem shocking and far-fetched, but is it really? A terrifying example of just how cruel people can become when they believe they can get away with it comes from the archives of Nazi Germany. In June 1942, Heinrich Himmler, head of Hitler’s secret police, the Gestapo, authorised the use of limited physical abuse during interrogations, ‘where preliminary investigation had indicated that the person could give information on important matters such as subversive activities’. As in all cases where specific groups of ‘enemies of the state’ have been singled out this order was limited to ‘communists, Marxists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, saboteurs, terrorists, members of resistance movements and Polish or Soviet Russian loafers or slackers’. Beyond those specific limits Himmler gave strict orders that any member of the SS or Gestapo suspected of having sadistic tendencies should be severely reprimanded and punished. There is, however, no question that Nazi interrogation methods went far beyond the limits set by Himmler. SS and Gestapo interrogators and guards routinely whipped, beat, chained and starved their prisoners. Those subjected to particularly intense questioning were immersed in ice water, nearly drowned, subjected to electric shock and having their fingernails ripped out. There is nothing here that the Spanish Inquisition would not have immediately recognised and condoned. So why did the Nazis carry out such horrific tortures if they had not been ordered to do so? Because they had been indoctrinated into thinking of their prisoners as something less than human and they knew their actions, although not sanctioned by official policy, would go unpunished.

Equally frightening is the fact that an American Army report, compiled after the liberation of Paris in 1944, concluded that much of the Nazi torture was completely random and pointless. In the report we find this conclusion. ‘The tortures were all the more horrible because the Germans, in many cases, had no clear idea of what information they wanted and just tortured haphazard[ly]’. This is truly a case of sadism for the sake of sadism but, as in all such instances of ‘official’ torture, the guilty parties actually believed their victims were somehow less than human and, of course, they could comfortably put the blame on some higher authority regardless of whether or not their actions bore official sanction. In the Middle Ages the torturers saw the Church as the sanctioning authority, the Church in turn, pointed to God. In Revolutionary France the approving authority was the Committee of Public Safety, in Nazi Germany it was Hitler and the High Command and at Yale and Stanford Universities it was Professors Milgram and Zimbardo. The point seems to be that so long as people actually have, or believe they have, someone to accept the blame for their actions, they will commit acts that they would never ordinarily contemplate.

In the instances of the Yale and Stanford experiments, the abuse ended when the experiments were ended or called off. The students involved suffered only a very limited exposure to the dark side of their own human nature. In instances of war – be it open, declared war or more subtle, undeclared wars like the Cold War, the War on Terrorism, or endless paramilitary in-fighting in Africa and the Middle East – the individuals involved experience year upon year of ever-increasing levels of brutality. The first time a (presumably normal) person beats a defenceless human being half to death must be a revolting experience; the second time is a lot easier and after ten, or twenty, or 100 such experiences it makes no impression at all. It is in this manner that brutality is so much like alcohol or drugs; slow but continuous exposure to the experience allows us to build up a tolerance and it is with complete knowledge of our tolerance-building capacity that governments slowly ratchet up the demonisation of target groups and the ever-increasing levels of brutality carried out against them.

In the aftermath of the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, US Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on NBC news. In his statement he obliquely referred to the fact that the US would: ‘work the dark side, if you will. We have to spend time in the shadows’. Precisely what he may have meant by that is open to speculation, but undoubtedly a part of the dark side included what the CIA – in a master-stroke of obfuscation and double talk – now refers to as ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’. In a December 2004 memorandum the US Justice Department stated that such enhanced techniques as prolonged, forced standing; forcing prisoners to wear hoods; subjecting them to loud noises and deprivation of sleep, food and drink might be considered inhumane but did not constitute torture. That point might be argued by the victims of England’s seventeenth-century Witchfinder General, Matthew Hopkins, who were subjected to identical tortures to the point where they confessed to having engaged in intercourse with Satan himself. In an attempt to clarify the Justice Department’s memorandum – but without actually saying anything at all – spokesman Erik Amblin refused to specify what specific interrogation techniques might be cruel and degrading but would still not qualify as torture. He did say, however, that: ‘acting with the specific intent of causing prolonged mental harm’ would be illegal under US and international law. Does this mean that causing a prisoner to have a mental breakdown is acceptable if it was unintentional? Does everyone have the same tolerance to torture? If not, then do US interrogators call in a psychologist to determine each individual’s emotional and physical threshold to pain before torturing them?

In an eerie reflection of Heinrich Himmler’s order specifying limits on when and how much torture could be inflicted on prisoners, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ on a single prisoner who was being held at the US military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who was suspected of being involved in planning the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Once this genie was officially out of the bottle, and US interrogators realised that censure and punishment for inflicting torture were unlikely to be levelled against them, the practice quickly spread to US forces in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

In May 2004, pictures of American soldiers, inflicting a litany of torture and abuse on prisoners being held at the Abu Ghraib Correctional Facility near Baghdad, Iraq, appeared on almost every major television network in the world. Like something out of the Middle Ages we saw photos – taken by the perpetrators themselves – of prisoners being beaten, kicked and slapped; their bare feet being jumped on by soldiers in combat boots. In other pictures prisoners were stripped naked and arranged in decorative piles, forced to masturbate and simulate fellatio, dragged around on the end of a leash like dogs and threatened with unmuzzled, attack-trained dogs. When called to account for her troop’s acts, the General in charge of Abu Ghraib at the time of the incident, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, insisted it was all the fault of ‘a few bad apples’. But was it? Or was it a case where the prisoners had been so dehumanised that no-one really cared how horribly they were abused? The ensuing investigation revealed that military interrogators came and went without even being asked to present identification. No authority figures checked on the prisoners’ status or well-being. To complicate matters even more, the prisoners and their guards did not speak the same language. Unless there was an interpreter present the guards had no way of knowing what the prisoners were saying. This in itself made the prisoners seem alien and suspicious.

What is certainly not open to speculation is the later testimony of American military policemen Chip Frederick and Ken Davis; both of whom served at Abu Ghraib at the time of the incident. Frederick stated: ‘It was clear that there was no accountability’, and Davis added:

    As soon as we’d have prisoners come in, sandbags instantly (went over) their head. They would flexicuff them; throw them down to the ground; some would be stripped. It was told to all of us, ‘they’re nothing but dogs’. You start looking at these people as less than human and you start doing things to them that you would never dream of.