Let’s talk about torture

Torture developed as part of the judicial process. The history of torture can be found in the law. Humans have tortured one another for at least five thousand years.

Today we might say that a pharaoh who whipped slaves and worked them to death to build a tomb to his magnificence was torturing them.

To the pharaoh it was simple economics.

Torture was and is inflicted to elicit evidence in interrogations of witnesses or defendants, before or after trial, if there is a trial, and as punishment.

Aristotle and Demosthenes (both 384-322 B.C.) wrote that torture was the surest way to obtain evidence.

The Romans’ torture system became the legal basis for torture in Europe, and later, for the New World.

Cicero (106-43 B.C.) wrote that the laws of torture were based on “custom.”

Emperor Antoninus the Pious (reigned 138-161) decreed that a master who tortured a slave had to sell him afterward.

Thanks, Antoninus!

Though wealthy Romans continued to torture slaves, Petronius Maximus (reigned for two months in 455) made it illegal for masters to make slaves fight wild beasts, without judicial approval.

Thanks, Petronius!

The Roman system required two people to inflict torture: tortores performed the physical torture, while quaesitores asked the questions.

This system survived in the Americas, in our centuries-long wars against Central and South America, where U.S. Army officers and CIA agents act as quaesitores, while Tio Sam’s puppets with Latino army officers and enlisted men as tortores.

I heard this straight from the mouths of torture victims I helped represent as a paralegal for law offices in six U.S. immigration prisons.

The United States repeated this process in Iraq, Afghanistan, in CIA “black sites,” and in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and now in immigration prisons in the United States.

This may be news to you, but torture does not end when, or if, the torturers let their victims live. And eventually, the damage redounds upon the country that inflicted it.

Many survivors of torture have recurring nightmares, and a debilitating sense of guilt, whether they are guilty of anything or not, other than being tortured — which, alone, induces a sense of guilt.

Another result of torture is loss of affect: the survivor has difficulty expressing emotion, or feels no emotion, even when confronted with emotionally wrenching scenes, a fatal car wreck, for example, or the death of a loved one. Or the torture victim may express inappropriate emotions, laughing at a fatal accident, or crying and trembling for no apparent reason, or withdrawing from an intimate relationship though he or she wants intimacy.

Most of the torture victims I know suffer bouts of fear and trembling for no immediate reason, and nearly all of them suffer to some degree from loss of affect. This is especially noticeable when they describe the tortures to which they were submitted: nearly always in a flat monotone, with no trace of emotion.

Lila was a beautiful woman of 24 when I met her. She was a mathematician. She was tortured because she worked for the Ministry of Education in El Salvador — a “subversive” agency in the 1980s under President Reagan.

The hood, rape, electroshock and being photographed naked were standard tortures in El Salvador, but Lila suffered an unusual side effect when she was living as an undocumented maid in the United States.

“There came a time when I could not open my mouth, the muscles were so stiff,” she told me. “The pain was horrible. ... Fifteen days passed and I was unable to talk. All I could do was take aspirin. It could be that it was psychological. For instance, since I've been talking with you, my jaw muscles have started to hurt again.”

Lila continued: “After one year in jail [in El Salvador], they tortured me so badly that my jaw and face swelled up and I bled from my eyes. Perhaps it was this coming back.”

Lila said this flatly, reflectively, as though being raped and tortured until she bled from her eyes, then years later being unable to eat or speak for two weeks were matters of moderate interest to her.

Why am I telling you this? It’s because torture is exacted every day across the world today, including — don’t kid yourself — in the United States. Don’t believe me? Check out Prison Legal News, an excellent monthly publication written from inside our prison walls.

Torture is still being inflicted on a mass scale across the globe: one religion against another (in India and Israel), one ethnic group against another (Han v. Uyghur in China; Anglos v. Latinos in the United States) and country against country (Russia v. Ukraine).

Torture has become policy.

Vladimir Putin is torturing millions of people in Ukraine, including children. Russia kills roughly 50 fathers in Ukraine every day, The New York Times reported. What will become of their children — 18,250 children a year left without fathers, assuming that each murdered father had only one child. And what will become of the children’s children?

Putin should be brought before an international criminal court, tried and hanged. Putin was born in 1952. He never suffered from a Nazi. He learned their tactics and adapted and adopted them for himself, surrounded by his neo-Soviet, neo-Nazi sycophants.

Get taught torturing one person, you could go to jail. Torture an entire country, and what happens? Narendra Modi buys Russian oil on the cheap and sells it to the United States. I bet I’ve got some of it in my gas tank. You too.

And the Venezuelan oil that we will soon be pumping into our cars?

Not our fault, my friends? Or is it?

(Amnesty International reported in 2013 that it found torture used by 141 countries of 195 countries in the world.)