Will It Ever End?

The title of John Conroy’s fine book insists on a paradox that is meant to disturb us: Torture is often carried out, and tolerated, by normal people, some of them decent and even courageous, like the Chicago police lieutenant who is one of Conroy’s perpetrators, a man who received numerous commendations for bravery. If the rhetoric of the title seems tired, it is not necessarily the author’s fault. The last half century has deadened most forms of writing about atrocity. We know that cruel acts are all too speakable; that prefix “un-” for which we always reach, meant to keep reality at bay, has become a desperate attempt to negate what people are capable of doing to each other. Torture and the threat of torture have become staples even of Hollywood movies, full of atrocious acts designed to evoke heartlessly ironic retribution. Cruel and unusual punishment is, unfortunately, far from unimaginable.

What is torture? My old Oxford English Dictionary defines torture as “the infliction of excruciating pain . . . by cruel tyrants, savages, brigands . . . or for the purpose of forcing an accused or suspected person to confess.” It is not a bad definition but, as Conroy’s book shows, it is also far from adequate.

Conroy’s book is organized around three events, one each from Great Britain, Israel and the United States, all of them allegedly upholders of United Nations declarations and resolutions denouncing torture. Conroy, a staff writer for the Chicago Reader, shows real moral courage in his choice of cases. It is one thing to write about documented, well-known examples of injustice, say, the practices of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s secret police, for which he is now almost universally held responsible. It is quite another to soberly document the torture carried out by the police department of the writer’s own city. The victim was an unpleasant double murderer named Andrew Wilson, who was given electric shocks, beaten and burnt after his arrest by colleagues of the Chicago police officers whom Wilson had shot to death in February 1982.

In choosing such an unsympathetic victim, Conroy is making a point of extreme importance: Even the most violent people have a right to have their own bodies protected from deliberately inflicted pain. The self-restraint of the powerful has been axiomatic since the general acceptance by modern states of the norms of evidence and punishment worked out during the Enlightenment. But it is often violated when an unstable state (or city) is faced with an emergency, particularly if that crisis can be translated into the language of subversion and terror, the panic-stricken vision of the enemy within. Torture can then become a fantasized means of “saving lives,” of getting to that ticking bomb before it explodes.

Despite its sometimes sinister modern reputation, Chicago may seem an unlikely venue for a collapse of civilized legal standards, but Wilson is black, and relations between America’s police departments and its black communities have sometimes resembled those between an occupying army and an alienated population. That was the atmosphere of the city’s South Side, as described by Conroy, in the days after Wilson’s senseless murder of the two officers. Police operating in an environment of endemic poverty and crime are tempted to take shortcuts to secure convictions, and Conroy shows how Wilson’s subsequent lawsuit against the police led to the exposure of at least 62 other cases of torture for information or revenge by police detectives.

The other two cases that Conroy describes are, however, more familiar torturing scenarios, in that the political relationships they embodied were more frankly colonial and coercive. The British Army in Northern Ireland chose 14 men from its botched internment sweep in August 1971, placed them in hoods, beat and dehydrated them and subjected them to prolonged sensory and sleep deprivation. It was a maniacally sped-up version of what the NKVD used in the time of the Soviet Great Purge. Conroy seems most emotionally engaged with the Irish material: His interviews with the victims make better testimony than anything else in the book and deepen our understanding of the effects of torture on its survivors--that damnable litany of insomnia, depression, spinal problems and ruined lives that is covered by the word “stress.” But this engagement makes the book feel slightly unbalanced, and Conroy is not quite as alert as he might be to exaggerated claims. One of the hooded men, Kevin Hannaway (a relative of Sinn Fein’s Gerry Adams), asserts that “nothing has changed,” that the British have refined their techniques of torture in the intervening decades; but there is very little evidence for this claim. Torture has not been used as a matter of policy in the interrogation of paramilitary suspects since the mid-’70s, and no reputable human rights organization claims otherwise.

The inhumane treatment of prisoners in the British state was deterred not by inherent decency alone but also by international protest, Irish American outrage and the Irish government, which took the men’s case to the European Court of Human Rights. Even so, Conroy reminds us that there were all too many voices at the highest level of the British establishment insinuating that the “methods” were not really torture because no sadism was involved and no one took pleasure in it. Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, accepted a minority report from one of three judges that denounced the interrogation methods. His colleagues, however, were eager to continue them. Conroy demonstrates how very close a democratic state came to institutionalizing torture, how its use is always a policy decision and how responsibility for it is usually traceable.

Britain had no real stake in Ulster, but in Israel, in the late 1980s, a government over two nations faced a mass uprising in occupied territory and went down that other road from which Heath had diverged, licensing, quite openly, “moderate physical pressure” on prisoners. Suffocating in a smelly hood while being violently shaken for three days would no doubt appear “moderate,” were not the prisoners’ contemplation of even worse treatment obscured by their fear and pain. Conroy discusses these overt forms of torture and the report written by the distinguished High Court Judge Moshe Landau that made them legitimate but focuses on the policy of beating rioters and breaking their bones that was passed down from Yitzhak Rabin to senior army commanders and, through them, to the troops confronting the stone throwers. In Beita and Hawara, two villages near Nablus, Lt. Col. Yehuda Meir took his orders literally and had his men drive 20 Palestinian males to olive groves where they were beaten carefully and savagely until they were crippled, in cold blood, not in the heat of a riot.

Each of these cases ended up in some kind of tribunal, and Conroy leads us through the four stages of his triple narrative at a measured pace--from the torture through the initial attempts to call the perpetrators to account to the trials and hearings and finally the verdicts and lingering effects, especially on the victims’ lives. The outcome for the torturers is easy to relate: No one was prosecuted in Ulster; an Israeli colonel was scapegoated and lost his job; and one Chicago police lieutenant was dismissed, but only after years of dogged obstruction by the city and the local judiciary.

The four distinct acts in each drama are punctuated by chapters reflecting on the history of torture and the socialization of torturers. Conroy revisits Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment, in which student volunteers at Yale administered what they thought were ever-increasing electric shocks to a “victim” under the calm orders of a supervisor, which demonstrated how ethically malleable most people are in the hands of confident authority, particularly when they are distanced in various ways from the victims of their actions. He also examines the consequences for those who are abused and the role of the bystanders, that is, those who did not protest or did not know how to, a category that could very easily include you and me.

The structure of the book, precisely because it is so symmetrical, makes me uneasy. The sequence that leads from crime to trial and a messy outcome representing a kind of poor justice has a distancing effect. It involves the reader in the detail of legal argument, of expert testimony, in the unexpected reversals typical of courtroom drama. The elemental revulsion that Conroy makes the reader feel in the chapters that describe the original events is dulled, their shock attenuated. The complex legal process imposes a false tension on the narrative, as though (and Conroy certainly does not intend this) the legal judgment might affect our instinctive moral verdict on torture. There is an important sense in which we don’t care what a judge decides: like Montaigne, who was very modern in this respect, most of us harbor “a cruel hatred of cruelty.” And as Conroy argues, trials of individuals are merely illustrative, choosing a few minor figures from a tight network that usually reaches high into the state. The importance of the recent, failed attempt to extradite Pinochet from London to Spain is that it has challenged the immunity that often screens the policymakers of torture and disappearance.

“Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People” gives few grounds for hope that all states--and Conroy is dealing with prominent democracies, not Third World dictatorships--will soon actively forbid their servants from torturing awkward, rebellious or suspect citizens. It might seem that an occupying army facing insurgent nationalists is the typical situation that produces torture. We live in safer zones; we think that torture is not our problem. Perhaps we should look more carefully at the events in that Chicago police station, for it may truly represent the ordinary case.