[Thom Hartmann]: Darius Rejali is with us. He is a professor of political science at Reed College, which is great, I mean, you're local, great to have you here in the studio with us, sir. You are also the author of "Torture and Democracy", which is rapidly becoming a best selling book and has been, by many reviewers, well, defined as the seminal book on torture, on the history of torture, and the relationship of torture to democracy in the United States. Darius, welcome to the show.
[Dr. Rejali]: Well, it's very nice to be here.
[Thom Hartmann]: Or Doctor Rejali.
[Dr. Rejali]: Oh no, Darius, please.
[Thom Hartmann]: Or professor.
[Dr. Rejali]: We live in Oregon.
[Thom Hartmann]: There you go, but we're broadcasting world wide.
[Dr. Rejali]: It's true.
[Thom Hartmann]: I don't want to minimize your credentials, which are solid. And before we get into all the obvious media kind of at the fluff level stuff, I want to drill a lot deeper than that in the conversation that we're going to have today, and also bring our listeners into this conversation. Our toll free number 866-987-THOM, which is 987-8466, and also in the 503 area code, 796-2324 for those people calling outside the United States. And if you want to drop into our live chat room, I'm in there, you can go to thomhartmann.com; it's free. Our live video stream, and Darius is visible in the camera; hopefully everything is working right. And, so we're here together.
But I want to get into this issue of torture and democracy. First of all, you got into this because, correct me if I'm wrong, your father is Iranian.
[Dr. Rejali]: That is correct.
[Thom Hartmann]: And your grandfather was Iranian royalty.
[Dr. Rejali]: Aristocracy.
[Thom Hartmann]: Aristocracy and was involved in torture.
[Dr. Rejali]: Well, not my grandfather, per se. There's an aristocratic side and there's a royal side.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right.
[Dr. Rejali]: My great grandfather was a member of the royal family in the 19th century and growing up as part of my childhood understanding their stories, understanding what they did, they were certainly not above torturing or killing large numbers of people who they considered to be terrorists. So I kind of came in to this through the back door. I'm not a victim per se, although I've had relatives who've been in prison and during the Shah in the 20th Century. But I guess you could say that I developed a capacity to hear incredibly dark stories, hang out with people who've done terrible things, have beer with them, and understand and try and get their perspective, mainly relatives. And that turned out to be a skill that stayed with me with life. For life.
[Thom Hartmann]: And thus in your new book, "Torture and Democracy", you have written the definitive, I mean, this goes back, torture back virtually to the beginning of, I don't want to say civilization, but modern society.
[Dr. Rejali]: Yeah. I actually kind of say that I'm the expert on modern government torture and interrogation because there are other great experts on, say, the inquisition or ancient.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right.
[Dr. Rejali]: But I decided that, well, you know, the study of modern torture really has three sides to it: what are the torturers, who are they, where do they come from, what happens to the victims, and what's the history of the techniques.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right.
[Dr. Rejali]: And so, the first two were well done, but the last one really needed a solid study, and so I spent the last 13 years working on this, long before anyone was really interested in torture.
[Thom Hartmann]: I'm curious, one of the things that has not been touched upon in our media; nobody has gone near this, with the exception of one day, one news cycle, in the Jose Pedilla story, was that he had been turned into basically a piece of furniture. He was incapable of communicating with his own counsel; he didn't believe that they were actually his lawyers, he thought he was still engaged in an interrogation process even when he was in court. He was, broken is not the right word to describe this man, he has been converted into something other than who he was, and perhaps arguably other than a fully functional human being.
And again, another story that just kind of flew through the news cycle for about an hour three or four days ago, is that Al, I'm forgetting my people who got tortured, Zabaia?
[Dr. Rejali]: Abu Zubaydah.
[Thom Hartmann]: Abu Zubaydah, thank you, has lost bladder function, lost control of his bladder function. In other words, the smallest thing frightens him and he pees his pants.
[Dr. Rejali]: That's right.
[Thom Hartmann]: And what is the consequence of the kind of torture that these people have been subjected to at the hands of the United States government with your and my tax dollars?
[Dr. Rejali]: Well, let me explain that there are many consequences to being subjected to torture, either physical, or the kinds of things that we now call not torture, whatever you want to call them. But the predictor of why people behave this way is that they perceive a lack of control. There are people who can be whipped and beaten and broken many times, as long as they have a strong sense of where they are and who they are and their sense of control, then they don't develop post traumatic stress disorder symptoms. And then, on the other side, if you have no perception of control, this is the strongest predictor that you are going to develop these symptoms.
One of the things that shows up in the memos, particularly the Bradbury memos, is they go through the pre-interrogation process, where they describe how the whole goal is to induce a condition of learned helplessness. That is to say, to completely make it clear to the detainee that they have no control even over the most basic functions of their lives. Once you get into that condition, post traumatic stress disorder is very common.
It's not the only consequence. One other consequence that is related to this, presumably, you know, when you meet lawyers, and this is a problem for any Gitmo detainee, everybody they've met up to that point has hurt them and so they have no reason to trust anyone called Federal anything, even if these people are there to defend them.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right, Marty Seligman, I believe.
[Dr. Rejali]: Yes, that's right.
[Thom Hartmann]: Yeah, he, in fact I quoted him at length in one of my books, and he came up with the idea of learned helplessness and also of learned empowerment, as it were. He actually wrote a very optimistic book about this, the title of which has long ago escaped me ["Learned Optimism" on pages 171-172 of Thom's "The Edison Gene" - ed.
], but was brilliant. And he referred to these studies with dogs where they would put a dog in a, there would be two boxes next to each other with a little platform between the two that was large enough for the dog to hop from one to the other and they'd give the dog an electric shock and he'd yelp and he'd jump into the next box and be safe. But when they put a harness on the dog so that he couldn't, you know, that kind of held him up where his feet were just touching the bottom where he'd get the shock, but he was incapable of jumping, and then shocked him over and over again, at a certain point, the dog got it that he was helpless. He learned that he was helpless.
And then they took away the harness and they'd give the dog the shock and he was perfectly capable of jumping to the next box and he never did. He would just sit there and whimper and just take the shock, take the shock, take the shock. And what they found was that even, you know, a year later, two years later, the saddest part of this whole story, was the follow up studies. These dogs were broken for life.
[Dr. Rejali]: That's right.
[Thom Hartmann]: There was nothing left.
[Dr. Rejali]: And that's also true for...
[Thom Hartmann]: For humans.
[Dr. Rejali]: For humans. They used to, in the 1970s, talk about creating centers for rehabilitation.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right.
[Dr. Rejali]: But now we don't even talk about rehabilitation, we talk about living with what happened to you. The other important point to make here is that the SERE program always gives people an opportunity to say no at the worst moment.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right. A safe word, essentially.
[Dr. Rejali]: But when you... Yes, there's a safe word, just like any S & M program too, there are also safe words. But in torture there's no escape, and so the conditions of learned helplessness happen and people really are broken for life. You can't even treat them. For example, people who were subjected to waterboarding or things like that, they can't take showers. So even treatments for physical damage that they've received, even doctors can't really help them sometimes.
[Thom Hartmann]: Wow, that's incredible. I want to get into what's going on with this administration. By the way, breaking news, Arlen Specter has just announced he is going to become a Democrat, and that' I'm sure, is will become part of our topic, particularly in our second hour as we get into the Democratic and Republican strategies over the years. You know, what they've been doing and what they're up to. But I want to stay with torture here for this hour. Darius Rejali is with us. He is the author of a brilliant book, "Torture and Democracy", and what's the subtitle of the book? I'm sorry, I don't have a copy in front of me.
[Dr. Rejali]: I don't think there is a subtitle.
[Thom Hartmann]: Oh, OK.
[Dr. Rejali]: The demand, the supply, does it work. And why, how did we get here.
[Thom Hartmann]: Yeah. There you go, and we're going to get back and how it works and bring you in on the conversation. We'll be right back.
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[Thom Hartmann]: And welcome back, Thom Hartmann here with you, defending America from the weapons of mass deception. 21 minutes past the hour. Darius Rejali is with us. He is the author of "Torture and Democracy", a professor at Reed College, here in Oregon, and one of the world's leading experts on modern techniques of torture and their consequences, and their consequences consequences on democracy.
Darius, what, the arguments are shifting. The administration apologists began by saying we did it and it worked. In fact there was this guy, CIA guy, who talked to ABC News a year ago and he said, "35 seconds, first time, Abu Zubaydah he broke, he told us the whole thing, everything was wonderful". It got repeated. Rush Limbaugh that next day said, "see this is, you know", blah di blah. So first they started out saying it's worked, it's moral, it was the good thing. Then they said, "OK, it's not moral and it's not torture". That didn't fly, so they said, "OK, we're going to set aside the issues of morality and whether or not it's torture; it works" and now we're back to the, well, it seems like now they're saying it's not actually torture because we do it to the guys in the navy program. They're trying out these talking points.
The Nazis used torture. The Iranians, you know, the Shah used torture.
[Dr. Rejali]: Yes, it's a well known history.
[Thom Hartmann]: But one of the things that I found perhaps most interesting was, let me just ask the question. First of all, does torture work?
[Dr. Rejali]: Well, let's get down to brass tacks. Whether you call it torture or not, these techniques, they can do one of three things.
They can intimidate you and obviously if someone's going to break my fingers or stick my head under water I can be intimidated, so obviously that works, but that's not an interesting case.
Can it get a false confession? Yeah, absolutely. Stalin showed that it works.
[Thom Hartmann]: Yeah.
[Dr. Rejali]: Because if you want to exonerate people, the question is, can it get accurate information in a professional and timely way? And here, when we look at the cases where we actually have statistical studies, real data, where soldiers and policemen tried to pick up people in the most scientific and professional way, to get the best data that they possibly could, what we're looking at, and these are the cases "Torture and Democracy" goes over, including the Gestapo cases where we have data, is that you have to arrest between 8,000 and 20,000 people minimally, torture all of them, or close to all of them, and in those circumstances you pretty much are getting 20 to 78 innocents tortured or killed for every one accurate hit. Now, to the Gestapo it's not a big deal to kill, you know, in one of their cases 7,443 Jews or Czechs to find the killer of Reichsprotektor Heydrich, right? But what American values are actually served by odds like that?
The other factor is that there are always cases, people cite them, where torture works. But usually these cases that are cited where it has actually worked are in peace time, not emergency situations. And, in fact, all the data shows that torture works when you need it least, i.e. when there is no emergency. And so one can never say that torture never works, but good luck on being able to justify it.
[Thom Hartmann]: Well, which raises the larger question: if you're trying to defend a democracy, and you're using torture, haven't you already lost?
[Dr. Rejali]: Yeah, I mean, one of the central issues, and I've been saying this since 2004, is that the war on terror is like any other, is not like any other kind of war. We're not fighting for land or wealth or things like this. I mean the whole point of people...
[Thom Hartmann]: It's a battle of ideas.
[Dr. Rejali]: Yeah, Osama bin Laden's basic point is all these values that the West keeps on espousing, if you read his sermons and so forth, are just nonsense. They say that they have these high values, but when it comes down to it, they're exploitative, mean, cruel and torturers. And so if you lose the battle of values, he has more talking points.
[Thom Hartmann]: Yeah, in fact, I made the collected speeches of Osama bin Laden one of my Buzzflash Books of the Month, and it's really a shock to read his writings, because he's in many ways this idealist, or he presents himself as one, and he's using our own behaviors against us, tragically.
[Dr. Rejali]: Yes, no, if you read the Sermons, you can see why young men in the Middle East find this persuasive. It always opens up with a very reasonable opening. It ends with the incredibly unreasonable conclusion. But yeah, you can see why this guy's incredibly charismatic.
[Thom Hartmann]: The Nazis, you and I were talking over the phone at the weekend, and you said that the Nazis were using more and more torture toward the end of the regime and it was less and less effective. Do I have that right?
[Dr. Rejali]: Yeah, basically what we have in the case of the Gestapo, I mean, you have to understand the Third Reich had many different police systems; the Gestapo was only one of them.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right.
[Dr. Rejali]: They're professionals in the Gestapo and they knew the basic rules: in counter intelligence, counter terrorism, what you need is public co-operation and we have studies that show the same thing, which is that in the absence of public co-operation the chances of finding the terrorists fall to less than 10 percent no matter what else you do. Most of the early successes of the Gestapo came because people turned in their neighbors, their friends and so forth.
[Thom Hartmann]: So this was before the torture began.
[Dr. Rejali]: Right. And they turned to torture...
[Thom Hartmann]: This was when Adolph Hitler was on the cover of Time Magazine and he was fabulously popular.
[Dr. Rejali]: Fabulously popular in Germany, right. The turn to torture happens as they lose their professionals in war, as real great anti-sabotage Gestapo people like Heinz von Pannwitz were killed in the war, they started hiring young men with shiny boots and give then whips, and why do the real hard work of policing when you think you've got a whip? And so there was a rapid deprofessionalization effect. My book goes through every known case of Gestapo success or failure and kind of shows that really the results towards the end of the war were were incredibly pathetic, which often compromised their own military strategy.
[Thom Hartmann]: I want to get into the consequences of this in the United States and to the United States, to our culture, and to this so-called war on terror. We're talking with Darius Rejali. Darius Rejali who is the author of "Torture and Democracy", an absolutely brilliant book, and one of the leading experts in the world on torture and we'll pick that up right after the break, plus breaking news on Arlen Specter.
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[Thom Hartmann]:
We're going to pick up some of your phone calls here. If you have questions for the expert on torture in the world, Darius Rejali, who is the author of "Torture and Democracy". Doctor Darius Rejali, the author of "Torture and Democracy". And we've got some callers for you, sir, but first, just a couple of points that we were discussing during the break and that I really want to bring out.
Torture not only destroys the person being tortured, we opened the show with that, it not only destroys the culture or harms the culture, we've seen that from what happened in Chile under Pinochet, to the Nazis, to, I mean, just pick a country. It happened in your grandfather's country, in Iran. It destroys the torturers.
[Dr. Rejali]: Yeah, and it gives bad info. And the really unknown part is how much it destroys torturers. A torturer produces something that we all recognize as atrocity-related trauma. Soldiers who are actually asked to do it, I mean, the lower down you are in the chain of command, the more you are forced to do it, the more you have higher rates of burn-out, alcoholism, suicide, etc. We've done studies of Greek torturers, Brazilian torturers, French torturers, we're finding pretty similar results. Basically, the conditions are not good so they have a lot of intra-family violence, things like that.
Additionally, I think, not only does it produce terrible post traumatic stress disorder, but even if it doesn't do that, it produces burnout. Most people forget that torture is a labor-intensive activity. When we interviewed the torturers, they basically said, "God I wish I was like James Bond. I could go out on a death squad and kill people. I wouldn't have to take my work home with me". But they have to take their work home with them, and eventually torture produces toxic levels of guilt and shame, which then sort of destroys the guys.
The other thing to say about the torturers, it teaches them incredibly bad habits. And those who don't develop these symptoms go on, if you think about it, if you're coming back from a war, you're an MP, what kind of skills do you have? Many of them go on, who are torturers, well think, why not become private security? Why not become a policeman?
[Thom Hartmann]: In other words, people internalize this behavior in one of two ways. They either internalize it as "what I did was terrible", in which case they have Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and they're more likely to be depressed and suicidal, which is one of the horrors of what Cheney and this administration have inflicted on our troops, or, they internalize it as, "that was a good thing I did and I need to keep doing it". And for example, there was, you refer to this period in Chicago, the Chicago torture crises of 1971 to 1993. Tell us about that.
[Dr. Rejali]: Well, in Chicago right now there is a multi million dollar series of suits against the city of Chicago, it appears in Area 2 implicating close to 50 detectives including possibly the second in command in the Chicago PD. These cases all seem to stem from torture of African Americans and Hispanics in the South side of Chicago. Now, when you study the torture techniques that appear in Chicago in this period, and these have been carefully documented, they first appeared in Vietnam. And a lot of these techniques appear to have been introduced into the police force by soldiers who had actually served in Vietnam. Same thing with waterboarding. We got that in police lockups all through the American South in the 1910s, 1920s immediately after the Philippine insurgency where ...
[Thom Hartmann]: The Spanish American War.
[Dr. Rejali]: The Spanish American War where so many soldiers learned how to do this stuff. So they came home and they brought it with them. Torture isn't just a policy. You have to recognize that torture is a practice and people learn it and it has a 20 year shadow. I think, sort of, those are the things, and as for the, I just want to say there's this great radio show on American RadioWorks called, "Whatever happened to Sergeant Gray?" [What killed Sergeant Gray?? - ed.] which describes a tank unit in Southern Iraq which was forced to do prison duty which undoubtedly involved torture, and what happened to the entire unit. No one ordered these people to do all these things, but the rates of suicide, alcoholism sort of, those kinds of things, those are characteristic of what's going on with this unit.
[Thom Hartmann]: So we're not, so the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld crowd, they're not only getting bad intelligence, first of all, it's largely useless. Number 2, they're destroying people, in some cases bad guys, but in some cases perfectly innocent people. They're turning them into furniture. I mean, they're destroying them in ways that we can't even imagine.
[Dr. Rejali]: Yeah, I mean, there's a selection problem. It's pretty obvious that many innocent people get locked up within the system, and I guess I would put it this way. None of us really knows how well torture works. We really look forward to the data, because in the past when the data dumps have finally happened, like they did in the Irish or the French cases, they've never been substantiated. But this is one thing we can all say; some of the data that took us into this war, for example the connection of weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda from Iraq...
[Thom Hartmann]: Right.
[Dr. Rejali]: Those techniques came from coerced interrogations involving use of Sheikh al-Libby and some of the actual prosecution of the war was driven by coerced information. So none of us know how much torture produced in terms of saving lives, but we know how many lives torture took, you know, just look at the data.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right. So, it's not only producing bad data, it's not only destroying the democracy, the culture that it came from, it's not only a recruiting tool for our enemies, it is also destroying the torturers, and this 20 year shadow, it's eventually going to come back to America and it's going to harm our own culture and our own, right here.
[Dr. Rejali]: Right. There is no sharp distinction between domestic and international torture. It comes home.
[Thom Hartmann]: Let's pick up some phone calls on this.
Michael asked about public opinion, Dr. Rejali replied...
[Dr. Rejali]: It's actually really a remarkable thing. There have been close to 30,000 Americans in close to 30 different polls in which people have pushed them very hard to say yes to torture by identifying ticking time bomb questions or telling them that torture will work and produce accurate information, and there's a fundamental misperception, actually, this has never changed, American public opinion, there has never been a pro-torture majority in America. Not a single poll from a major polling organization, not even Fox, could get more than 44% for torture on this. The new polls can get the high numbers because they drop the word 'torture' and they put in 'harsh interrogation'. The vaguer you are in the wording of a poll, the more support you can get. Conversely, if you ask Americans, 'would you support waterboarding if it saved an American terrorist attack?' then torture collapses. Only 20% support that.
There have also been polls of US soldiers serving in Iraq, both marines and regular army soldiers, and the highest numbers, and they're asked, 'would you torture to save a fellow soldier's life?' and the regular army says 35% would. I.e. close to two thirds of all American soldiers serving in Iraq in the 2006 military survey said they would not. So there is a fundamental misperception that's been sort of generated by politicians and journalists about where the public norm is. In fact, we've just tested this out in a major poll and it seems the more pro-torture you are, the more of a mistake you make; you think that twice to three times as many people are with you than ever were.
[Thom Hartmann]: So the Sean Hannity's of the world represent a very small minority, or at least a significant, a third minority, but they think that they represent a majority.
[Dr. Rejali]: Right. And what this does is it produces what's famously known as the bystander affect. It's not that Americans are indifferent, it actually that they don't want to be the fool because gosh, if everyone else is against torture, for torture, then why should I do it? It scares everybody. Thanks to president Obama, we can now actually say, 'look, here are the polls we're going off'.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right. Yeah.
...
Frank said that while we were going after Saddam Hussein, saying he was a tyrant and killing and torturing people, we ourselves were torturing. We need to bring charges before other countries do.
[Thom Hartmann]: You raise a really important question, Frank, for Dr. Rejali, and that is, how do countries recover from torture?
[Dr. Rejali]: Well, first of all, let me just say that I was in Yemen last spring and everyone was so excited about having Barack Obama as president of the United States and there's still a tremendous amount of goodwill out there towards the United States, even in places like Yemen, where you wouldn't expect that. Secondly I would say that yeah, we did misplace our priorities. But let's face it, there are people out there who really do want to hurt us and what we really do need is a good counter-terrorism policy, one that's really intelligent and one that's based on sound policing practices. And, you know, I know plenty of people from the FBI, Jack Cloonan, for example, who brought al Qaeda people in using standard policing techniques, the same ones that we used to bring in the Mafia. Breaking in to a terrorist group is just like breaking in to the Mafia. You need inside informants. You need public co-operation and you can pretty much get them. So yeah, the problem is that what happens after you have a torture crisis is that your intelligence services get deprofessionalized. All the pros who were supposed to be there working get disgusted with the torturers and they leave.
[Thom Hartmann]: Has that happened to us already?
[Dr. Rejali]: I'm pretty much sure that we can see this by the slew of retirements that happened in the last eight years, and all these people who went into being private contractors. So what you see always, you saw this in Brazil, you saw this in France, you saw a split between...
[Thom Hartmann]: When the French were torturing the Algerians.
[Dr. Rejali]: When the French were torturing the Algerians. You see a split between the pros who know how to do counter-intelligence and everybody else who wants to be Jack Bauer. And the more you torture, the more people who volunteer are people who want to be like Jack Bauer. So it takes 5 or 6 years before you can actually get your intelligence services back online to fight.
[Thom Hartmann]: Wow, incredible, incredible.
Shannon mentioned the Einsatzgruppen who killed Jews, and the impact a torture culture can cause us to lose our sense of the other, turning people into objects, which has to happen for us to allow torture. Barbara Coloroso's work.
[Thom Hartmann]: Yes. Dr. Rejali, a comment on that?
[Dr. Rejali]: Well, I guess I have two thoughts. Yes, I mean, in one sense, one of the great things about this torture crisis that we're having right now is that the worst that's happening to the Democrats and the Republicans are document dumps where each is accusing the other and more information is coming out. We forget that in France, for example, the military nearly overthrew the Fifth Republic under De Gaulle in 1962 and there was a near putsch, and the Fourth Republic collapsed under the torture crisis. We forget that in Brazil, all these torturers, when they came back, they couldn't integrate them into democracy so they actually have a special prison outside of São Paulo in which they put all of them. So, you know, there's a very different world which we live in, here. We're actually a lot healthier. Machiavelli once said, "scandals are great for democracy; conspiracies are their end". And, you know, what's great about a torture scandal like this one is we can talk about these things.
I think the other point is that, yeah, torture has come into out public imagination and Christopher Hitchins is now proud of the fact that for his birthday he can waterboard himself once, and he feels like he has done it better than KSM. Now we find that KSM is the reigning waterboarding champion at 183. I mean, these kinds of things become ridiculous, but that's where torture hides; it hides in hazing in all these fraternities, which then they come back when torture finally gets to come out of the cage.
[Thom Hartmann]: Right, George Bush branding his fraternity brothers with a hot iron.
Manny's grandfather was picked up and tortured by the Gestapo for refusing to be a good Nazi; he was never the same afterwards.
[Dr. Rejali]: The worst thing about torture is it destroys the atom of trust that builds social relations together. It's not just that you don't trust the state, it's that you can't trust each other, you can't a spoon or a doctor because these are things that were used to hurt you.
[Thom Hartmann]: You can't take a shower.
[Dr. Rejali]: You can't take a shower. Every part of your relationship to the world is fundamentally disrupted when you're subject to violence like that.
[Thom Hartmann]: And those who subject people to violence are as, not as damaged, but seriously damaged by it as well and the society is damaged by it.
[Dr. Rejali]: The society is damaged but the people who are least damaged are the ones who just do the orders.
[Thom Hartmann]: Really. Seriously.
[Dr. Rejali]: Yeah. So the father away up the chain you are, if you authorize.
[Thom Hartmann]: Oh, who give the order. John Yoo and Jay Bybee, they are the ones who are least damaged by it, and Dick Cheney.
[Dr. Rejali]: Yeah, we don't live in a perfectly just world.
[Thom Hartmann]: Yeah, amazing.
Transcribed by Sue Nethercott.
