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Iranian Studies
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Torture and Democracy
Ervand Abrahamian
a
a
Baruch College, City University of New York
Published online: 22 Dec 2011.
To cite this article: Ervand Abrahamian (2012) Torture and Democracy, Iranian Studies, 45:1,
152-155, DOI: 10.1080/00210862.2011.594634
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2011.594634
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Torture and Democracy, Darius Rejali, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press,
2009, ISBN 978-0-691-14333-0, xxiii + 849pp.
Any interrogation technique including the use of truth serum or even torture is not
prohibited, all that is prohibited is the introduction into evidence of the fruits of
such techniques in a criminal trial against the person on whom the techniques
were used. (Alan Dershowitz)
152 Reviews
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Some two decades ago Darius Rejali gave us his thought-provoking Torture and Mod-
ernity. Self, Society and State in Modern Iran, which applied Michel Foucaults concept
of disciplinary punishment to twentieth-century Iran. He has now turned his atten-
tion to the general topic of torture throughout the whole world, providing us with
a panoramic view packed with all the conceivable information we would ever want
on the technical side of the subjectplus much more. He has meticulously categorized
over ninety techniquesfrom the common garden variety of brute force, beatings and
whipping, to the more sophisticated forms of sleep deprivation and electrical devices,
all the way to solitary connement, white noise, water boarding, pharmaceuticals and
sensory deprivation. He has also cast his net wide, bringing in not only vast periods of
historyfrom ancient Athens to the contemporary agebut also from all four
continents, drawing examples from South and North America, Asia, Africa and, of
course, western and eastern Europe. What is more, he has made intelligent use not
only of handbooks, manuals and human rights reports, but also of memoirs and all
the available secondary sourcesincluding novels, lms, television shows, science
ction and pop culture. This massive tome is truly an encyclopedic work bearing
witness to deep commitment.
Despite the dense detail and sometimes overwhelming information, Rejali has one
straightforward central thesisthat torture, especially the hidden stealth type, is not a
monopoly of unsavory authoritarian regimes as we would like to believe, but is readily
found in democratic ones too. The book title is disturbing but carefully chosen. He
argues forcefully that we are brought up to automatically link tortureespecially the
most hideous onesto Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Maoist China, wartime Japan
and, of course, the Catholic Inquisition. But, he argues, the more innovative and
hideous ones came from countries he denes as democratic. The reason for this,
he argues, is that democracies, because they face more scrutiny, need to cover up
their misdeeds and leave no permanent marks on the body. Thus true gurus of
modern torture appear not in brute dictatorships but in modern democracies.
One introductory phrase aptly sums up the core of the book: The modern democratic
torturer knows how to beat a suspect senseless without leaving a mark (p. 3). For
readers who may have lost their way in this massive work, Rejali towards the end
has a section entitled: Is the Main Claim of This Book about Torture or Technol-
ogies of Physical Coercion? Is it about Democracy or Public Monitoring? His
answer is straightforward: Public monitoring leads institutions that favor painful
coercion to use and combine clean torture techniques to evade detection (p. 559).
To strengthen his case, Rejali stretches his category of democracy to include wide
variety of states in time and space that one would not normally deemas suchespecially
imperial powers in their colonies. Much of his empirical information comes from the
British in India, Kenya, Palestine, Cyprus, Aden and Northern Ireland; the French
in Vietnam, Morocco and Algeria; the Israelis in the Occupied Territories; and the
Americans in the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq and now in Afghanistan. It is hard to cat-
egorize these environments as democracies. What is more, whenever the book refers to
torture within the home countries proper it tends to gloss over whether the victims were
deemed full citizens or some other because of class, race, religion or ethnicity. Rejali
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makes a persuasive case that torture has been routine in the twentieth-century United
States, but from his evidence it is unclear how many of these victims were Afro-Amer-
icans in Jim Crow environments or poor whites. Similarly, the Israeli armed forces
readily resort to torture in dealing with Palestiniansbut would they do so in
dealing with Jewish citizens within Israel? The French during the Algerian war
readily resorted to horrendous torture in dealing with Muslims from North Africa,
but would they have done so with true Frenchmen residing in France proper?
Ancient Athens tortured slaves but not citizens. Surprisingly, Nazi Germany decreed
strict rules on who could and could not be tortured. The Gestapo had to obtain
special permission to subject Aryan Germans to the third degree. The targets had
to be Marxists, Jehovahs Witnesses, terrorists, vagabonds and anti-social elements.
Similar unofcial redlines exist in so-called democracies where the police sometimes
resort to enhanced interrogation. So far as we know, victims of torture since 9/11
have been non-citizens. What is more, the US government seems to have meticulously
observed the taboo of torturing them on American soil. Such taboos unwittingly but
loudly speak volumes about modern rituals and mentalities. Maybe we should redene
our notion of democracy. We should move it away from the conventional right to vote
since few nowadays put much stock in the right of political participationtowards
having immunity from torture.
Rejali is keen not only to link torture to democracy but also to debunk the wide-
spread but false notion that it sometimes works. Ever since the time of Jeremy
Bentham advocates of torture have claimed that such methods can stop ticking
bombs, and thus, in theory at least, save many innocent lives. Rejali makes a persua-
sive case that torture has never stopped such a bomb and examples that are often cited
especially since 9/11turn out at closer investigation to be pure fantasy and self-
serving ction. Torture, he argues convincingly, invariably provides false or at best
out of date security information.
In knocking down the claim that torture works, Rejali tends to set up a straw man
focusing too much on the ticking bomb. Torture may not prevent ticking bombs, but
it canand often doeswork both in dismantling underground organizations and in
extracting false confessions. Such recantations can then be used in show trials or in
grand theater in the form of the stake or scaffold. Such forms of torture have been
put to use in very different polities and in very different historical periodsin reli-
gious settings such as the medieval Inquisition, in early modern witch hunts and abso-
lutist monarchies such as the Tudors, and in twentieth-century states such as Stalinist
Russia and eastern Europe, in Maoist China, in Baathist Iraq and Syria, and now in
the Islamic Republic of Iran. When and why such different states resort to such
tortureand on a much more massive scale than for the ticking bombis not a ques-
tion that Rejali dwells on. If he had, he would have had to explore why Stuart England
hardly a democracyseems to have observed a taboo against brute force but
readily extracted witchcraft confessions through highly stealth forms of torture:
long periods of sleep deprivation and solitary connement after which victims were
ready to confess to anything and everything including riding brooms, ying
through key holes and having painful sex with the devil himself. Political scientists
154 Reviews
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have only recently discovered torture; historians have been writing about it for
decades. The task at hand seems to be not so much to examine the mechanics of
torture but to explore why such different regimes nd it expedient to resort to such
practices and often accompanying bizarre public shows.
Ervand Abrahamian
Baruch College, City University of New York
2012, Ervand Abrahamian
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00210862.2011.594634
Reviews 155
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