A Look at Torture (2)

Back in the early 80s, when my work in a southern city involved a few stints at news coverage, a media colleague dropped by and offered to take me along to the police station.  The police had finally caught a couple of members of a motorcycle-riding gang of snatchers who sowed terror, mostly on women who were cruelly divested of their handbags.  If their getting caught were true, that was a scoop.

We were still at the gate of the police station when I heard a terrifying wail.  I saw through the open jalousies of a window a young man, probably in his early 20s, crying while being manhandled, pushed up a wall amid his shouts of pain.  Strangely, it was his face that seared my mind and not the face of the policeman in civilian clothes; he must have been a policeman or who else could it be, the place being a police station.  The policeman seemed to me as just a whole big dark mass, faceless and inhuman.

I decided to retreat, caring less about the news scoop.  I learned that the wails were because the suspect was shot in the leg, and it was this bullet wound that the torturer, he must have been a torturer for lack of a more apt term, repeatedly inserted his finger into the bloody, raw wound, making the suspect wail in pain with all his might and bounce up against the wall.  All the world’s mothers would not wish that on the worst of other mothers’ sons.

Yet it was meant to terrify the suspect into confessing and squealing on his partners.

At that very moment I must admit I favored the underdog, suspect or not.  There was still no due process in court, much less a conviction.  Yet for once I dared not make heads or tails of the situation, having lost the capacity to tell right from wrong at that instance.  All that gripped me then was that someone was in pain.  Helpless, I did the only thing that instinct demanded.  I ran to the nearest sewerage and puked.  There ended my crime reporting before it began.

When that incident skims through my mind all these years, I wonder if I would have reacted the same way to that scene if I were one of the snatching gang’s victims, losing all the money I had for my next meal, risking my upper limbs if not my life as I grapple with my bag.  I have no answer.

So what really constitutes torture and what is in man that impels him to wreak it?  By definition, torture is “the infliction of excruciating physical or psychological pain for such reasons as punishment, intimidation, coercion, the extraction of a confession, or the obtainment of information.”  This may include sleep deprivation, humiliation by nudity, isolation, and physical punishments like open-handed slapping and ear-boxing.

The irony of the current tortures inflicted on detainees in the war on terrorism led by the United States is that it was an American study that put to doubt the belief that only sadistic individuals are capable of carrying out torture.  Even ordinary people of different backgrounds and occupations are capable, given the right setting and motivation, as shown by volunteers of the study who gave agonizingly painful and unsafe levels of electric shock to the “victim” when ordered.

One can only surmise whether those prison guards, male or female, assigned to Abu Ghraib are by nature sadists to begin with or just soldiers who obey orders without question.  And June 26 came and went silently.  It was the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.

(2004)