Photo: Björn Suomivuori

Darius Rejali is a political science professor at Reed College, Oregon. What makes him interesting is his incredible insight into the theories behind torture, out of a social scientific perspective. His book Torture and Democracy has been called “Scars and Stripes” by Financial times. This robust Yankee made quite an impression; beneath his charismatic shell lies a pure academic with the solutions that will put an end to democratic states’ use of torture, simple but politically impossible to achieve.  He argued in a calm and well structured way, easily convincing anyone. In this first part of the interview he talks generally about torture, how states justify its implementation and many more interesting things!

Generally about torture: who uses it, where does it exist, why do we use it, how do we define it and what to you think about it?

The international definition of torture and what I study are somewhat different things. The international definition is a moral and legal definition, I study torture socially scientifically, any form of violence that meets four criteria; It has to involve a state official (or designated state official), a prisoner (who is detained), cases that involve physical pain and when the pain is used for authorized state purposes which is information, confession and intimidation. That is what I think of as torture, the UN definition of torture is broader than this; it includes mental suffering.

If you consider states in the Middle East, like Syria or Iran, that have a broad security apparatus - would you say that  torture is more common because of that?

We cannot talk about the magnitude of torture, it is very hard to do that, but what we can say is that if a country tortures once in a previous year it has a 93% chance of torturing in the following year, that’s pretty clear. Once you go you don’t go back. I hate to say that, but it’s the sad truth. Having said that torture is a worldwide phenomenon there are a few very important things.

There is a demand side and a supply side to torture. On the demand side, and there are many reasons for why states demand torture, interestingly torture technology is not the same regardless of the demand. In the early days, Syria had an extremely brutal torture regime, it still does. Most of the techniques that it uses leave scars. Iran, by contrast, uses white torture, which leaves no marks. They have different purposes, and during the last 100 years scarring torture has been disappearing and clean torture has increased. It first appeared in democracies; where there are Human Rights Organizations watching the police forces, the police get sneaky. They hit you in ways that do not leave marks. For example, the first time electro-torture was used was in Haiti by Americans in 1916. So the French also introduced this technique in 1931 in Vietnam. Now, no-one uses electricity because it is fairly dangerous, it can kill you. What is great about it is that it leaves no marks, and there was a world-wide explosion of using it in the 1960s. The more we watch, the sneakier everybody gets. So in Iran for example, where you had scarring torture before the revolution, now white torture is the most common method. Nevertheless, there are these amazing confessions made that have clearly been coerced.

What is the most common state justification for torture?

It really depends on state needs, and they vary: information, confession or intimidation, again.

You could easily think that the most common justification for torture is national security, but actually a lot of torture happens without that having anyting to do with it. For example, in Rio de Janeiro, most of the torture there is for common crimes, confession to briberies and so forth. Beating up street people is a way to make sure that these people do not come back to where nice middle-class people live; you torture them once or twice and everybody gets the message. This is more common than the other version, in fact torture related to national security probably counts for less than a third of the cases.

The purpose of obtaining information is a regular purpose….?

It is a regular purpose but it’s marginal, only happens in the context of war or terrorism. But the other versions are for crimes that have already happened.

How useful is this?

Ah, the effectiveness question... Here are the basic facts: For torture to be efficient, best scenario, you have to arrest between 10 and 20 thousand people, you have to torture all of them, out of that you get one accurate hit for every 20 to 70 innocent people you torture. That’s the rate, you pick. For the Gestapo this was an acceptable rate.

So the question you should ask; what is the acceptable rate for a democracy? Since the justification for torture is to protect innocents, the rate of error has to be zero. Can torture get to zero? Odds, no.

The other problem is public co-operation: the absence of it, when you start torturing, you kill the very thing that is supposed to give you the information.

Not only is this very good to know, but the other side is that public co-operation works even when time is short. The closest example we have on this is Great Britain july 2005 when those guys got on the buses, and they managed to nail all seven of those guys within a week. They key came two days after the attempt when the CCTV cameras showed one of the guys getting off the bus and one of his parents turned in their own son to the British police; that was one of the key moments which led to the solving of everything else. Would a British Muslim turn in her son if she knew he was going to be tortured by British police? No. That is the key. Without public co-operation you have already lost.

Questions about the effectiveness of torture suppose that it works. And there are cases where it works, for example in a peace-time non-emergency situations. But these are the cases when you need it least.

So in other words the US war on terrorism and the use of torture it justifies is not efficient?

Well, it’s a bad kind of terrorism policy and anybody could tell you that. Talk to any professional interrogator, and they would say this: when you torture your way through a system, you lose all the information you need.

Does the US not say that they use waterboarding for the more important targets?

It turns out they are wrong. Yusef Sheikh Al-Libi was captured in Afghanistan in 2002, interrogated by Jack Clooning, a FBI guy, and started talking after three days. The CIA came in and snapped him up and for four months Mr. Al-Libi was gone.What Mr. Al-Libi said during this time in CIA custody was that he had seen or heard that Saddam Hussein was training Al-Qaida and was supplying them with WMDs. This went straight to the president’s speech in Cincinnati 2002. Yes, Al-Libi was indeed a member of Al-Qaida, but if you make assumptions about what prisoners know and then whack them, they will tell you what you need to know. Mr. Zubaida for example, who was presented as the key operator, was actually a paranoid schizophrenic who made travel arrangements for the women of Al-Qaida according to Ron Suskind. Most FBI guys will say this, but the CIA operatives do not, because their careers are at stake.

What about private contracting of torture?

We are going to see a lot more of that!

What about the outsourcing to Halliburton and Xe Services (Blackwater)?

There is private contracting that the military does and then there is private contracting that the state department does. The contracting done for the state department is much more dangerous than the contracting done for the military. The military does not want contractors doing forward battleground stuff, whilst the state department uses guys like Blackwater to protect their own officials.

We know that KC. and Titan had private contracts in Abu Graib in 2004.

In the future, the wars that will be fought will be asymmetrical. This means more counter-terrorism, which means information will be at a premium, which means interrogation. Odds are, there will be people who think they can do this by torture. So typically, they will hand this off to private contractors to have less liability. This opens up a whole new area of law.

FERENCZ THUROCZY

This interview was presented in cooperation with the Center for Middle Easter Studies at Lund University

Joakim Henriksson also participated in this interview for the UPF Radio and will publish a short version of this interview next week