Torture

I

Introduction

Torture, the infliction of bodily pain or mental suffering either as punishment, to compel a person to confess to a crime or provide information, or to intimidate, coerce, discriminate against, or repress a person or group of people for political purposes. The methods of torture and the reasons for it have varied throughout history. The word torture comes from the Latin term tortus, which means “to twist.”

Throughout history, the extreme measure of torture has often been reserved, even in societies condoning it, for offenses of the highest ideological order, where the offender is perceived as threatening the society’s basic beliefs.

Although torture has been documented throughout much of human history and prohibited by law in many countries, it was not addressed explicitly by international law until the modern human rights movement began following World War II (1939-1945). This movement was born in reaction to crimes against humanity carried out by Nazi Germany and Japan.

Some historians believe torture was carried out more widely in the 20th century than at any other time in human history. And torture continues to be practiced. In the early part of the 21st century, for example, members of U.S. military and intelligence agencies reportedly used methods of torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the detention facility at the U.S. Naval Station in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In spite of an absolute prohibition against torture under international law, some efforts have been made to justify torture as an appropriate method for combating terrorism.

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II

Torture in Ancient Greece and Rome

In ancient times, torture was used for affronts to the authority of slave-masters. In early Athens in ancient Greece, slaves were always examined by torture, and for this reason their evidence was apparently considered more valuable than that of freemen. A free Athenian could not be examined by this method, although torture may have been used occasionally in executing criminals. Law in ancient Rome permitted the torture of an accused suspect but banned the torture of witnesses. Where a witness, freeman, or slave was believed to have committed treason, however, he could be legally tortured. Torture was frequently inflicted even on freemen to obtain evidence of the crime of laesa majestas (“injured majesty,” or crime against a sovereign power). Rome’s use of red-hot irons and lacerating hooks is well-known. The statesman Cicero and other enlightened Romans condemned the use of torture.

III

Torture in the Middle Ages and After

In the early Middle Ages, torture was used as a means of ordeal—usually as part of a religious initiation rite—and to punish captured enemies. Examination by torture, often called the “question,” was used in many countries as a judicial method. It involved using instruments to extort evidence from unwilling witnesses. The techniques were usually crude and involved inflicting intense physical pain.

During the later Middle Ages, torture was usually reserved for heresy, which undermined the theocratic foundations of society. Until the 1200s torture was apparently not sanctioned by the canon law of the Christian church. About that time, however, the Roman treason law began to be adapted to heresy as crimen laesae majestatis Divinae (“crime of injury to Divine majesty”). Soon after the Inquisition was instituted, Pope Innocent IV, influenced by the revival of Roman law, issued a decree in 1252 that called on civil magistrates to have persons accused of heresy tortured to elicit confessions against themselves and others. This decree was probably the earliest instance of ecclesiastical sanction of this mode of examination.

The influence of the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages contributed to the adoption of torture by civil tribunals. The Italian municipalities adopted torture early, but it did not appear in other European countries until France legalized its use in the 1200s. Ultimately, torture became part of the legal system of every European nation except England. Although torture was never recognized in the common law of England, it was practiced by exercise of the royal prerogative.

The horrors of the Inquisition and the excessive use of judicial torture from the 1300s to the 1500s brought about a progressive change of sentiment, which eventually led to the abolition of torture in all European countries. Judicial use of “the question” to compel a confession of treason was halted in England in 1640, but flogging as punishment continued into the 1800s. By the middle of the 1700s, legal torture had been abolished in France, Prussia, Saxony, and Austria.

Torture was not legally sanctioned in the American colonies. However, the use of stocks, pillory, ducking, and branding were imported from England. Americans invented and exported a device called the head cage that caused sleep deprivation. There was also a colonial practice of hanging sex offenders by their genitals. Judicial opposition to torture arose in the 1700s in all parts of the colonies except the South.

IV

Torture in the 20th Century

In the 20th century, methods of torture became more sophisticated and often left no physical mark on the torture victim. During this period the motivation for using torture was not only to obtain information without regard for legal rights but also to intimidate people from speaking out or organizing against a repressive government or an occupying army. In modern times, torture has been generally reserved for perceived enemies of the state.

The use of torture in the 20th century was revived on a major scale by regimes espousing national socialism, fascism, and Communism, usually as a weapon of political coercion. In addition, some Communist governments made use of the so-called brainwashing technique, a form of psychological torture in which mental disorientation is induced by methods such as forcing a prisoner to stay awake indefinitely. Brainwashing was reportedly practiced extensively on prisoners held by the Communists during the Korean War (1950-1953). Complaints about the use of physical and psychological torture have also been lodged against many governments in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, and the United States

The first real revolution in the use of torture since the 1600s came with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) discovery of psychological or “no touch” torture. Whereas the physical approach requires the torturer to inflict pain, the psychological method stresses disorientation and forcing people into stressful positions or situations. Beginning in the 1950s, the CIA Office of Science and Technology tested lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and other drugs on unsuspecting subjects.

The CIA developed a classified interrogation manual called “KUBARK Counter Intelligence Interrogation–July 1963,” which was used globally for the next three decades. The manual discussed the “principal coercive techniques of interrogation,” which it identified as “arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis, and induced regression.” Especially effective in depriving an “interrogatee” of sensory stimuli, the manual stated, is placing the person in a “cell which has no light” or a “water-tank or iron lung.” The manual recommended placing people under interrogation in situations where pain is seemingly self-inflicted, such as forcing a person to stand at attention for long periods, rather than having the interrogator inflict pain directly.

The CIA used the manual in its notorious Operation Phoenix program during the Vietnam War (1957-1975), which involved identifying and assassinating people active with or sympathetic to the Communists. The CIA manual was also used extensively by the U.S. Army at the School of the Americas (SOA, now known as the Western Hemispheric Institute for Security Cooperation), which was first established in Panama after World War II and then moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1984. Many SOA graduates were responsible for massacres and torture in Latin America, notably the suspected death squad leader Roberto d’Aubuisson in El Salvador and the convicted assassin of Roman Catholic bishop Juan Gerardi Conedera in Guatemala, among others.

Military dictatorships and paramilitary groups in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador frequently relied on torture in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s to silence their political opposition. During this period, typical torture techniques included the use of electric shock by attaching electrodes to genital areas, immersing prisoners in water until they nearly drowned, hanging prisoners by their arms or feet, the use of blindfolds and hoods to disorient victims, playing extremely loud music for long periods of time, rape and sexual degradation, exposure to extreme cold and heat, the use of stressful positions, and mock executions.

Torture was not confined to Latin America during this period. It was used by the British in the 1970s during the Northern Ireland conflict. The French perfected torture techniques in their efforts to suppress wars for independence in Algeria and Vietnam in the 1950s and 1960s. The apartheid government in South Africa used torture in its attempts to repress the African National Congress and other groups that sought democratic majority rule. Until the Israeli Supreme Court outlawed torture in 1999, Israel was the only democratic country in the world that sanctioned the use of torture as a legitimate means of extracting confessions. The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI), an independent human rights organization that petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to outlaw torture as a technique of interrogation, issued a report in 2001 that said loopholes in the court ruling allowed torture to continue. The use of torture has also been documented in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and many other countries.

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