Watching Torture

It is part of the mythology of torture—an element, surely, in the self-esteem of torturers—that the dark art is practiced in clinical, white-tiled chambers, equipped with the latest technology. Not so in Greece—or, I suspect, anywhere else. Auden, as usual, had it right: "…even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course/anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot." The colonels' second-busiest torture chamber was a squalid shack on the roof of a military headquarters in central Athens. That was where this film had been shot.

Who had filmed the footage, and why and when, was never clear. That was one reason why the council's final report made no mention of it. The film's value was that it showed that rooftop shack, validating all the rumors about what was going on there.

The footage was blurry, shot with a handheld 8mm camera in the poor light filtering through the shack's small windows. There was no sound—which lent merciful distance to what it showed: the interrogation of some unidentified middle-aged man, undergoing falanga, mostly (beatings to pulp the feet), though the session culminated in anal rape with a stick. What remains as a true horror in the memory is less those activities than the demeanor of the inquisitors. A couple of men in shirts were administering the torture. But a pair of interrogators stood off to one side, mostly out of the frame. They came to the victim before and after each bout, evidently asking questions. Then they'd go back out of frame, to let the next round of beatings commence. Two men in neat dark suits, professionals, just doing a job—unpleasant, perhaps, but necessary, as they saw it, for the safety of the state.

That no doubt is the true horror of the tapes the CIA destroyed—worse, even, than the sight of the torture procedures themselves. We assume it shows waterboarding, the near-drowning of someone strapped to a cruciform plank. Memories of that Savak instructional film tell me, indelibly, what the videos would have looked like: the torturers calmly pouring water over the cloth covering the victims' faces, the frenzied chest-heavings as the bodies went into shock, the gasping and retching as each session ended. More horrifying still would have been the actions, or inactions, of all those standing around. There must have been interrogators, and an interpreter. Certainly a doctor, watching the victims' vital signs on a monitor to gauge how long each session could last. This being America, there may have even been a lawyer on hand. All professionals, doing something unpleasant, but—you understand—necessary for the safety of the state. And at the end of the day, one assumes, they drove home to their families.

This is where 9/11 has brought us. No wonder Rodriguez destroyed those tapes.

© 2007