Remember the "third degree"? It used to be the standard way many
police departments in this country extracted confessions from criminal
suspects. The practice was sharply diminished after the 1931 Wickersham
Report prepared by the National Commission on Law Observance and
Enforcement, which found that the "'third degree' -- the infliction of
physical or mental pain to extract confessions or statements -- was
'widespread throughout the country' and was 'thoroughly at home in
Chicago.'"
The methods identified in the Report "range from beating to
harsher forms of torture. The commoner forms are beating with the fists or
some implement, especially the rubber hose, that inflicts pain, but is not
likely to leave permanent visible scars ... authorities often threaten
bodily injury ... and have gone to the extreme of procuring a confession at
the point of a pistol.'" It further found that the practice of police
torture in the United States was "shocking in its character and extent,
violative of American traditions and institutions, and not to be tolerated."
So the third degree gave way to the jailhouse snitch and other
resources developed by the police to clinch their cases.
The torture issue has been hanging around now for a month or so,
as noisome as a nineteenth century London fog. Open the Nov. 5 edition of
Newsweek, and there is Jonathan Alter, munching on the week's hot topic,
namely: Should the FBI torture obdurate Sept. 11 suspects in the Bureau's
custody here in the United States? Alter's tone was lightly facetious, as in
"Couldn't we at least subject them to psychological torture, like tapes of
dying rabbits or high-decibel rap?"
As so often with unappealing labor, Alter arrived at the usual
American solution -- outsource the job: "We'll have to think about
transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies."
What's striking about Alter's commentary and others writing in
the same idiom is the abstraction from reality, as if torture is so
indisputably a dirty business that all painful data had best be avoided. One
would have thought it hard to be frivolous about the subject of torture, but
Alter manages it.
Would one know from his commentary that under international
covenants torture is illegal? One would not, and one assumes that Alter
regards the issue as entirely immaterial. Would one know that in recent
years the United States has been charged by the UN, and also by human rights
organizations such as Human Rights Watch, as tolerating torture in prisons
in many states, by methods ranging from solitary, 23-hour-a-day confinement
in concrete boxes for years on end, to activating 50,000 volt shocks through
a mandatory belt worn by a prisoner?
Alter expresses a partiality for "truth drugs," an enthusiasm
shared by the U.S. Navy after the war against Hitler, when its intelligence
officers got on the trail of Dr. Kurt Plotner's research into "truth serums"
at Dachau. Plotner gave Jewish and Russian prisoners high doses of mescaline
and then observed their behavior, in which they expressed hatred for their
guards and made confessional statements about their own psychological
makeup. The Navy's interest was anticipated by the OSS, which developed a
THC-based truth serum of its own in its labs in St. Elizabeth's Hospital.
The serum was tried without any success on scientists working on the
Manhattan Project.
Start torturing, and it's easy to get carried away. Torture
destroys the tortured and corrupts the society that sanctions it. What about
Israel, which called an official halt to torture in 1999? They're still
torturing. In July, AP and the Baltimore Sun relayed charges from the
Israeli human rights organization Beth T'selem of "severe torture" by police
of Palestinian youths as young as 14, who were badly beaten, their heads
shoved into toilet bowls and so forth.
But Israel subcontracted, too. When Israel finally retreated
from its "security strip" in southern Lebanon, run by its puppet South
Lebanese Army, the journalist Robert Fisk visited Khiam prison. His report
for The Independent, May 25, 2000, began thus: "The torturers had just left,
but the horror remained. There was the whipping pole and the window grilles
where prisoners were tied naked for days, freezing water thrown over them at
night. Then there were the electric leads for the little dynamo -- the
machine mercifully taken off to Israel by the interrogators -- which had the
inmates shrieking with pain when the electrodes touched their fingers or
penises. And there were the handcuffs, which an ex-prisoner handed to me
yesterday afternoon. Engraved into the steel were the words: 'The Peerless
Handcuff Co. Springfield, Mass. Made in USA.' And I wondered, in Israel's
most shameful prison, if the executives over in Springfield knew what they
were doing when they sold these manacles."
If those handcuffs are sold these days to the FBI's
subcontractor of choice, at least the executives will know they have
Jonathan Alter to explain the patriotic morality of their bottom line. But
at least Alter is only a pundit. For now, the line from the U.S. Justice
Department is superior in moral fiber. U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft
told Ted Koppel recently: "We don't want anyone to be subjected to
interrogation that would violate their rights. And I mean by that, we don't
want to extort any kind of confession. We don't believe extorted confessions
are reliable ... We don't engage in those kinds of practices. As a matter of
fact, if I were to learn that so -- those kinds of practices had been
undertaken -- and I have had no report of that -- I would be very
distressed, and I would take action."
Alexander Cockburn is coeditor with Jeffrey St Clair of the
muckraking newsletter CounterPunch. To find out more about Alexander
Cockburn and read features by other columnists and cartoonists, visit the
Creators Syndicate Web page at
www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2001 CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
