The Senate's CIA torture report is torturing the American soul.
Torture is always what our villainous enemies do. What we do is "enhanced interrogation." In Houdini's day the quintessential villain was the insidious Dr. Fu Manchu, "the yellow peril incarnate" created by Harry's friend Sax Rohmer. (Racism went unrecognized back then, at least by white people.) Perhaps this is why Harry christened his most famous escape the "Chinese Water Torture" cell.
Houdini was a great student of torture and torture devices and he certainly knew this was not named after some ancient Chinese method. The so-called "Chinese water torture" - dripping water onto the victim's forehead until he confesses/goes mad - was actually an American thing, regularly used at Sing Sing prison in upstate New York. We apparently imported it with our European ancestors: it was was first documented in Italy in the 1500s.
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| Water torture at Sing Sing, c. 1860 After release of the Senate report, commentators took one of two paths. The first, led by President Obama, explained that we tortured some folks, but "torture isn't us." The second, led by former Vice-President Cheney, exclaimed that what we did was not only effective and legal, it could not be compared to the tortures America has always loudly condemned as war crimes. |
A little impartial research shows both positions are wrong. The story is laid out in detail in the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law in a comprehensive article by Evan Wallach called "Drop by Drop: Forgetting the History of Water Torture in U.S. Courts."
The bottom line: U.S. courts have consistently held that artificial drowning interrogation is torture, which violates U.S. statutory prohibitions.
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| Allied sergeant beheaded after torture in World War II. |
After atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, the Japanese military tortured a captured American fighter pilot named Marcus McDilda in order to discover how many atomic bombs the allies had and what the future targets were.
McDilda, who knew nothing about the atomic bomb, "confessed" under torture that the U.S. had 100 atomic bombs and that Tokyo and Kyoto were next. McDilda's false confession swayed the Japanese leaders' decision to surrender.
What more can we learn about this from those whose job it is to probe the innards of the mind, namely, magicians and martial artists? Black artists and ninjas? Stay tuned for "Black Art and Black Ops."
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[Images via Google.]
Torture has never been a reliable way of extracting information. The victim will eventually confess what he believes you want to hear.
ReplyDeleteThat poor Allied soldier was a P.O.W. and under the Geneva Conventions entitled to decent treatment rather than execution. The Japanese also executed three of Doolittle's Raiders who were captured when their planes went down in China. They also shot many Allied soldiers who could not keep up during the Bataan Death March. Nice, decent folks, huh?