Watching Torture

I think I know why Jose Rodriguez, then head of the CIA's clandestine service, destroyed those two videos of the interrogations of a pair of suspected Al Qaeda operatives. They were disgusting.

We have taken refuge in euphemisms. "Enhanced," sometimes "aggressive" interrogation techniques—or, the latest offering of a CIA spokesman, "special methods of questioning"—are, deliberately, verbal anesthetic. In the wake of the last great war to save civilization, George Orwell taught us to distrust euphemisms. Always and without exception, they are designed to dull us to the truth. Those CIA videos would have stripped anyone who saw them of that comfortable distancing—confronted everyone who viewed them with the unimaginable reality of what the U.S. government has authorized in our name.

Why do I suspect this? Because I've seen two films of torture sessions. Years ago, both of them. Even now, on bad nights, images surface. The unerasable pornography of calculated violence.

One film came from Tehran. The shah's secret police, the Savak, were notoriously savage. (My first instruction in this came in Amman, Jordan, in the early 1970s. A British consular official told me about an Iranian exile who had gone from Jordan into Iran to try to organize unions. Savak caught him, surgically amputated his arms and legs, and sent his living trunk back to his family in Amman as a warning. I looked for the man, but his family had fled with him from Jordan. The consul knew him, though, and had talked with him.) After the Shah fell in 1979 and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini took over, one of his early appointees to a top job, Sadegh Ghotbzadeh, decided to delve into the Savak archives. He found neatly filed certificates recording the demise of everyone who had died under torture—hundreds and hundreds of forms. "How Ottoman we are," Ghotbzadeh marveled. "Even in this, there is a procedure to be followed." He also found a shelf of reels of film. He smuggled a couple out to Cairo, and it was there that, under an oath of secrecy, I viewed one in the Nile-side apartment of an Egyptian friend and ally of Ghotbzadeh's. (Ghotbzadeh was terrified, trembling. He suspected, correctly as it turned out, that Khomeini's regime would turn to just these measures, so anyone who knew of them would be at risk. His fear proved prescient; he was executed in 1982.)

I recall the reel unspooling with a clatter through the 16mm projector in that apartment with its curtains drawn. The film lasted, I think, for close to an hour, though my memory may be at fault. It seemed endless. I have no words to convey the horror. The film showed sequences of torture on living victims, men and women, all naked and shackled to what looked like a bed frame. A variety of techniques were demonstrated: cigarette burns to sensitive parts of the body, the effects of electricity, and then on into other savageries I shy from recalling. One technique shown on the film used water. The film was clearly professionally made. There was a commentary, which Ghotbzadeh translated—explaining, among other things, the varying sensitivities of men and women to different techniques, with a filmed example to illustrate each lesson. This was an instructional film. These torture sessions were not even designed to elicit information. The film was intended to teach Savak recruits.

The other film I saw in, of all places, Copenhagen. After a military junta took power in Greece in a coup in 1967, allegations of torture spread swiftly. The Council of Europe decided to have its human rights commission investigate the rumors. Proof was hard to come by. But a film of what was alleged to be a torture session in Athens surfaced in Denmark. (By what route I never could find out.) With a member of the Commission's inquiry team, a longtime friend, I flew to Copenhagen to view the film.