Adam Hochschild, "What's in a Word? Torture," New York Times, 23 May 2004, 11.
Adam Hochschild is the author of ''King Leopold's Ghost'' and the forthcoming
''Bury the Chains,'' a history of the British antislavery movement.
DATELINE: SAN FRANCISCO
As Orwell pointed out most effectively, governments control language as well as
people. Since the Abu Ghraib prison scandal broke, our government, from the
highest officials in Washington to Army prison guards in Baghdad, have used
every euphemism they can think of to avoid the word that clearly characterizes
what some of our soldiers and civilian contractors have been doing: torture.
''What has been charged so far is abuse, which I believe technically is
different from torture,'' said Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. ''I'm not
going to address the 'torture' word.'' And nobody else seems to want to address
it either. Rather, we are told, military police officers at Abu Ghraib were
encouraged to treat the prisoners so as to create ''favorable conditions'' for
interrogations. What does this mean? Give the prisoners English lessons? New
clothes? Come on. In any bureaucracy, orders or clearance to do something
beyond the law always comes in code. For those in senior positions, deniability
is vital.
Some years ago, I heard a man who had narrowly escaped the death squads in El
Salvador explain how deniability worked there. ''The military will call a
meeting of commanders,'' he said. ''They will say, 'You know, this man David X
is getting to be a threat to us.' Then the commanders, when they have their
meetings with their own officers, they'll say, 'You know, today we heard of
this man who's making a lot of trouble for us.' Then when those officers meet
with the sergeants, his name will be floated again. And you can assume David X
will soon be dead.''
Shortly afterward I interviewed a general who had some of the most notorious
Salvadoran death squads under his command. Death squads? Orders for executions?
Of course not! He showed me a loose-leaf notebook, carefully listing complaints
of human rights abuses with a chart showing how each case had been
investigated.
Pentagon officials doubtless have their own versions of that general's
loose-leaf notebook to show to human rights investigators. Obviously, no coded
orders, suggestions or hints given to the Abu Ghraib prison guards will appear
in them. And, no, these were not orders for deaths -- but they were for actions
similarly beyond the law. What the paper trail will have, however, are the
euphemisms for what was actually done:
* ''Sleep management.'' This apparently benign term -- doctors use it in
discussing insomnia -- disguises a form of torture that has long been popular
because it requires no special equipment and leaves no marks on the body.
Widely used in the Middle Ages on suspected witches by inquisitors, it was
called the tormentum insomniae. Hundreds of years later, in the interrogation
rooms of Stalin's secret police, it was known as the ''conveyor belt,'' because
relays of interrogators would question a prisoner, day and night, until he or
she signed the desired statement and named enough co-conspirators.
After being kept awake for a hundred hours or so, almost anybody will confess
to almost anything, from flying through the night sky on a broomstick to being
a capitalist spy. Soviet prisoners of the 1930's had to sign each page of their
interrogation record. In the files that have been released from archives in
recent years, you can sometimes see how a prisoner's signature, clear and firm
on the first day, gradually turns into an indecipherable scrawl as the
sleepless nights roll by.
*''Water-boarding.'' This, as we now know, does not involve water skis, but
holding prisoners under water for long enough that they think they are
drowning. Again, interrogators favor it because after the prisoner has coughed
the water out of his lungs, it leaves no identifiable marks. Reports by human
rights groups on countries including Brazil, Ethiopia and El Salvador have
noted the prevalence of ''simulated drowning'' or ''near drowning.''
*''Stress positions.'' What is a stress position? Mike Xego, a former political
prisoner in South Africa, once demonstrated one for me. He bent down and
clasped his hands in front of him as if they were handcuffed, and then, using a
rolled-up newspaper, showed me how apartheid-era police officers would pin his
elbows behind his knees with a stick, forcing him into a permanent crouch.
''You'd be passed from one hand to another. Kicked. Tipped over,'' he
explained. ''The blood stops moving. You scream and scream and scream until
there is no voice.''
This begs an obvious question: when the Abu Ghraib detainees were in ''stress
positions,'' were they then kicked, tipped over, rolled around like soccer
balls? We do not yet know, but chances are that if the guards were told to
create ''favorable conditions'' for interrogation, the prisoners were not
lectured politely about the benefits of human rights and the rule of law that
the United States is supposedly bringing to Iraq.
Granted, the torture of prisoners under Saddam Hussein was incomparably more
widespread and often ended in death. The same is true in dozens of other
regimes around the world. But torture is torture. It permanently scars the
victim even when there are no visible marks on the body, and it leaves other
scars on the lives of those who perform it and on the life of the nation that
allowed and encouraged it. Those scars will be with us for a long time.