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Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture
Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People is a riveting book that exposes the potential in each of us for acting unspeakably. John Conroy sits down with torturers from several nations and comes to understand their motivations. His compelling narrative has the tension of a novel. He takes us into a Chicago police station, two villages in the West Bank, and a secret British interrogation center in Northern Ireland, and in the process we are exposed to the experience of the victim, the rationalizations of the torturer, and the seeming indifference of the bystander. The torture occurs in democracies that ostensibly value justice, due process, and human rights, and yet the perpetrators and their superiors escape without punishment, revealing much about the dynamics of torture.
313 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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February 11, 2017
pg 25
"A fourth pattern of torture is observable here: it arouses little protest as long as the definition of the torturable class is confined to the lower orders; the closer it gets to one's own door, the more objectionable it becomes."
pg 34
"Sleep deprivation falls into a category of torturers, seemingly more commonly used now than in the past, that are favored because they leave no marks on the victim. Depriving prisoners of sleep or food, forcing them to stand for long periods of time, confining them in positions that cause acute muscle strain, depriving them of use of a toilet, all allow interrogators to proclaim that they never laid a finger on the men or women in their charge."
pg 83
[In reference to police torturing suspected cop killers in Chicago]
"It often seemed there were two cultures in conflict in the courtroom. One was black, poor, given to violence, and often in trouble with the law. The other was white, respectable, given to violence, and in charge of enforcing the law."
pg 99
"Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but to participate in mass murder he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers."
pg 100
“Everyone who participated in the experiment was debriefed afterward. Obedient subjects offered a variety of defenses before they were told that the learner had not actually been shocked [to death]. Some denied that the shocks they were giving were painful. Others blamed the victim for volunteering for the experiment. Many, Milgram wrote, harshly devalued the victim. “Such comments as, ‘He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,’ were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.”
Other participants were completely aware that what they were doing was wrong, but could not bring themselves to disobey. Milligram reported that some of those took comfort from the idea that their thoughts were in the right place, feeling that “within themselves, at least—they had been on the side of the angels. What they failed to realize is that subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not transformed through action.”
pg 110
"... Amherst professor Ervin Staub argues that obedience to authority is just one factor in the making of a torturer. Staub argues that a society can be an incubator for human rights abuse, that nations can march gradually along a continuum of destruction until the employment of torturers is no radical step and the men and women hired for the job merely reflect the attitudes of the larger society."
pg 113
"One of the bleakest views on the effectiveness of torture was given to me by Don Dzagulones, who served as an interrogator with the American Division of the United States Army in Vietnam and who witnessed and participated in torture.
In an interview in August 1995, he told me that he could not recall a single incident in which torture was used to a positive end. 'If it happened, I am certainly not aware of it. Like prisoner X comes in, you beat the living snot out of him. He tells you about a Viet Cong ambush that is going to happen tomorrow, you relay the information to the infantry guys, and they counter-ambush and the good guys win and the bad guys lose, all because you tortured a prisoner. Never happened. Not to my knowledge. And you don't get any more functional as an interrogator than I was. i mean I was the bottom rung, you don't get any lower, this is it, this is the front line for interrogators, that's where i was. So my experiences aren't universal, but they were at the nitty-gritty level, down at the base. We started the ball rolling.'
Dzangulones believes that torture did generate reports, and reports pleased the chain of command."
pg 182
"Thus the forces unleashed by a man only doing his job, a man simply following orders, a man who may not know even the name of his victim, are extraordinarily powerful. Long after the torture and his or her prey are dead, the acts committed in a hidden place--perhaps in a matter of a few minutes or hours-- live on. The man who feels 'nothing personal' against his victim, who takes comfort in the belief that he is not as bad as some other torturer, who believes that he was not so bad because his victim did not die, never sees the extent of his damage, never considers that he has assaulted generations yet unborn."
pg 211
“'In this case, it was a very intelligent soldier, they knew about Kfar Kassem, they learned about it in school, but because they were so involved in the events, they saw no red light, no hearts, no nothing. And the argument was that it was a very illegal order, that you can see from one kilometer away that you are not supposed to do it. When you read it in the paper, when you see it in the TV, you say, 'That's obvious.' But if you talk to the soldier, you see it is not so obvious.
'But I think what is interesting here is not the torture itself. What is interesting is how good people, good teenagers, form good families from a good kibbutz, wit the political ideals of the Left, do a thing like this. At the time they got the order, they did not say, 'It's bad and I have to do it.' They did not say, 'It's bad and I must do it or else someone will kill me.' They did not say, 'It's bad and I don't want to do it.' They did it, and just when they were twenty-five they said, 'Oh, what a mistake it was. You are not allowed to do what we did, and I don't know how I didn't catch it at the time that it happened.'
'I see Omri—he is very good, he cannot harm a fly-- and he did it, and today he can't understand why. And he says, 'It was a mistake and I hope that I will have the power not to do it again.' He doesn't say that because he was punished—he got away clean. That is what is interesting. That you can drive him to some situation where he will do it.
'I had great arguments with omri. He told me, 'If you had some through the paratroopers, and I had gone into MPI, you would have done it and I would have investigated it.' Like all destiny, it is not how clever you are.
'I have an advantage on you because I lived it and I think about it a lot. And after all those years, this is what remains in my head—that you can take a good farmer—when he was fourteen, he was driving a tractor, a John Deere, on the kibbutz—and you can train him, tell him to do something, and he will do it. Everybody, even me. I didn't do it because I went to the MPI and they told me in school, 'This is good. His is no good,' but I think maybe it can happen to me. And if it happened to me for the first time when I was a colonel, I would find myself in jail. And maybe that I what happened to Yehuda Meir. Maybe he is not a bad guy.'”
pg 240
“I found I did not have to journey far to learn that torture is something we abhor only when it is done to someone we like, preferably someone we like who lives in another country.”
pg 243
“When a dictatorship is overthrown by a democratic regime, torture squads typically elude punishment because the new government is not entirely secure. After the junta fell in Argentina, for example, the new government lived in constant fear of a coup; the leaders of the ruling junta were prosecuted, but to avoid riling the armed forced further, there was no great purge of torturers, no indictments of whole companies of men. In other countries in which civilian governments have taken over from a regime that practices torture, the new leaders, seeing the need for order and continuity, have decided it was not practical to replace every judge, prosecutor, and policeman who held office during the dark ages; as a result, the bureaucracy that supported or tolerated torture remains in place, a bureaucracy understandably not interested in investigating the sins of the past. In other nations where torture has been systematic, reform governments have become convinced that what their country needs is reconciliation and healing, that prosecution of torturers would once again polarize society, that the best course is to avoid indictments for human rights violations. Other liberating governments have declined to prosecute either because they quickly find the torturer's tools quite useful or because the liberators have a history of torture themselves.”
pg 244
“In various nations in which notorious regimes have fallen, there has been a public acknowledgment that people were tortured. In democracies of long standing in which torture has taken place however, denial takes hold and official acknowledgment is extremely slow in coming, if it appears at all. The response of those societies is fairly predictable and can be charted in thematic, if not chronological, stages.
Consider, for example, the British reaction to the revelations they they were torturing the Northern Irish in 1971. The first stage of response was absolute and complete denial, accompanied by attacks on those who exposed the treatment. Northern Irish Prime Minister Brian Faulkner announced that there had been 'no brutality of any kind.' The London Sunday Times was denounced for printing 'the fantasies of terrorists.'
The second stage was to minimize the abuse. The government referred to it not as torture but as 'interrogation in depth.' Home Secretary Reginald Maulding proclaimed that there was no 'permanent lasting injury whatever, physical or mental, to any of the men.' The majority report of the Parker Commission proclaimed that any mental disorientation should disappear within hours, and, if it didn't, it might be the men's own fault, the product of anxiety caused by 'guilty knowledge' and 'fear of reprisals' from comrades for having allegedly given information. In the Compton Report, Sir Edmund Compton and his colleagues concluded that part of the torture had been done for the men's own good: the hooding kept the prisoners from identifying each other, thus preserving each man's security. The beating of Joe Clark's hands had not occurred; his hands had been massaged by guards in order to restore circulation. The guards who forced men to perform strenuous exercises were merely trying to keep the prisoners warm.
A third stage is to disparage the victims. Lord Carrington judged them to be 'thugs and murders', while Reginald Maulding proclaimed, 'It was necessary to take measures to fight terrorists, the murderous enemy. We must recognize them for what they are. They are criminals who wish to impose their own will by violence and terror.' Yet after extensive torture and ostensibly extensive confessions about their acts of 'violence and terror', none of the hooded men were charged with any crime.
A fourth stage is to justify the treatment on the grounds that it was effective or appropriate under the circumstances. Lord Balniel, junior minister of defense, said that there was no evidence of torture, ill-treatment, or brainwashing, and that the methods employed had produced ;invaluable' information about a brutal, callous, and barbaric enemy. Compton proclaimed that the five techniques had been used on the men because it was 'operationally necessary to obtain [information] as rapidly as possible in the interest of saving lives.' On November 21, 1971, the Sunday Times poked holes in the apologists' claims, pointing out that if the interrogation methods used on the hooded men 'were approved for use in any British police station, where the need for information is sometimes just as urgent as in Ulster, there would be universal outrage.' The Sunday Times editorial staff dismissed the claim that cruel treatment was justified if it saved lives. How can you be sure, the paper asked, that the prisoner has the information you seek, that the lack of information will indeed mean someone will die, and that cruel methods extract reliable information? The claim that lives were saved became even more suspect as time passed. The IRA was invigorated by new recruits inspired by the cruel treatment accorded the Catholic community, and in the calendar year following the introduction of internment, the number of shootings rose by 605 percent, the number of armed robberies increased 441 percent, and the number of deaths rose 268 percent.
A fifth component of a torturing society's defense is to charge that those who take up the cause of h tortured are aiding the enemies of the state. So when the Republic of Ireland persisted in its suit against the United Kingdom on behalf of the victims, the guardian argues that the republic's own government was 'torturing Northern Ireland' by 'force feeding the Provisionals [the Provisional IRA] with propaganda.'
A sixth defense is that the torture is no longer occurring, and anyone who raises the issue is therefore 'raking up the past.' Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees leveled that charge at the Irish government when it persisted in its pursuit of the victims' cause five years after their ordeal. Fifteen years later, there was widespread support for throughout the United Kingdom for the War Crimes Bill, which became law in May 1991 and which allowed for the prosecution of former Nazi officials for crimes committed fifty years earlier. (Lord Carrington and former Prime Minister Edwin Heath opposed the bill). It is always easier to see torture in another country than in one's own.
A seventh component of a torturing bureaucracy is to put the blame on a few bad apples, In defending themselves before the European Court, the British proclaimed that it was not an administrative practice, but rather a few men exceeding their orders. If this had been the case, however, there would seem to be no reason why the torturers could not have been publicly named and prosecuted.
An eighth stage in a society's rationalization of its policy of torture is the common torturer's defense, presented to me by most of the former torturers I interviewed, that someone else does or has done much worse things. When the subject of the hooded men arose, it was common for the British government to spokesman and many other editorial writers to respond by denouncing the IRA for its callous campaign of random murder, as if that justified the torture of randomly chosen men who, on the whole, were not members of the IRA. In the wake of the European Commission decision labeling the five techniques torture, the Times of London hastened to point out that Britain should not be 'lumped together with regimes past of present in Greece, Brazil, Iran, Argentina.' The Times argued that the techniques employed by those regimes put the victim in terror of the continuation of pain, and that the terror forced the victim to submit to the interrogator. The British techniques, the Times said, were not as evil because they were not designed to induce terror, but rather to induce a state of mental disorientation so that the victim's will to resist was lost.
A final rationalization of a torturing nation is that the victims will get over it. In a 1982 interview, General Harry Tuzo, the Oxford-educated commander of the army in Northern Ireland at the time Jim Auld and others were tortured, claimed that the victims, who in Tuzo's words had suffered not torture but 'acute discomfort and humiliation', had been 'very well compensated and looked after.' 'I personally would have thought,' Tuzo said, 'that they had got over it by now.' Similarly, General Jaques Massu, the French commander who throughout his life staunchly defended the widespread sue of torture by his troops during the Algerian war, dismissed the pains suffered by Henri Alleg, the European-Jew who wrote a book about his experience as a victim of Masu's policy (The Question, George Brazziler 1958). Massu saw Alleg in 1970, thirteen years after he was tortured, and based non that viewing discerned that the torture suffers was in 'reassuringly vigorous condition.'”
pg 252
“One small study of people who helped Jews during the Holocaust...found evidence to indicate that altruistic behavior was related to three personality traits: a spirit of adventurousness, an intense identification with a parent who set a high standard of moral conduct, and a sense of being socially marginal. In London’s small sample, the spirit of adventurousness was perhaps best exemplified by a man whose prewar hobby was to race motorcycles on courses that required driving over narrow boards that spanned deep ditches. Once the war began, that man and his friends got a kick out of putting sugar in the gas tanks of German army vehicles, a practice that disabled the engines. The identification with a parent with high moral standards was prominent in the case of a Seventh-Day Adventist minister from the Netherlands whose father had gone to jail for his beliefs; the minister described himself as mildly anti-Semitic, but during the war he organized a large-scale operation for rescuing Jews, believing simply that it was a Christian’s duty. That minister, who belonged to a religious group with an extremely small number of followers in Holland, was also cited as an example of what the researchers called, ‘social marginality’: a social separateness, a feeling of being an outsider, that seemed to allow the rescuers to have less fear about losing their attachment to the majority group. One highly effective German rescuer, also part of London’s sample, had been a stutterer as a child and in an interview confessed that he had always felt friendless. The residents of the French village of Le Chambon, who saved thousands of Jews during the war, also had a certain social marginality: they were Huguenots in overwhelmingly Catholic France."
pg 254
"In his book The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, Staub argues that helping is infectious, that helpful bystanders, if they are not devalued by the perpetrators and inactive bystanders, break the uniformity of views, chip away at widespread antagonism toward a particular group, affirm the humanity of the victims, call attention to values disregarded by perpetrators and passive bystanders, and make it clear that persecution can have consequences for the persecutor. Staub points out that the citizens of Le Chambon seemed to have a profound effect on the Vichy police charged with rounding up the Jews: anonymous callers, believed to be the policemen, warned the local pastor of impending raids.”
"A fourth pattern of torture is observable here: it arouses little protest as long as the definition of the torturable class is confined to the lower orders; the closer it gets to one's own door, the more objectionable it becomes."
pg 34
"Sleep deprivation falls into a category of torturers, seemingly more commonly used now than in the past, that are favored because they leave no marks on the victim. Depriving prisoners of sleep or food, forcing them to stand for long periods of time, confining them in positions that cause acute muscle strain, depriving them of use of a toilet, all allow interrogators to proclaim that they never laid a finger on the men or women in their charge."
pg 83
[In reference to police torturing suspected cop killers in Chicago]
"It often seemed there were two cultures in conflict in the courtroom. One was black, poor, given to violence, and often in trouble with the law. The other was white, respectable, given to violence, and in charge of enforcing the law."
pg 99
"Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but to participate in mass murder he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle papers."
pg 100
“Everyone who participated in the experiment was debriefed afterward. Obedient subjects offered a variety of defenses before they were told that the learner had not actually been shocked [to death]. Some denied that the shocks they were giving were painful. Others blamed the victim for volunteering for the experiment. Many, Milgram wrote, harshly devalued the victim. “Such comments as, ‘He was so stupid and stubborn he deserved to get shocked,’ were common. Once having acted against the victim, these subjects found it necessary to view him as an unworthy individual whose punishment was made inevitable by his own deficiencies of intellect and character.”
Other participants were completely aware that what they were doing was wrong, but could not bring themselves to disobey. Milligram reported that some of those took comfort from the idea that their thoughts were in the right place, feeling that “within themselves, at least—they had been on the side of the angels. What they failed to realize is that subjective feelings are largely irrelevant to the moral issue at hand so long as they are not transformed through action.”
pg 110
"... Amherst professor Ervin Staub argues that obedience to authority is just one factor in the making of a torturer. Staub argues that a society can be an incubator for human rights abuse, that nations can march gradually along a continuum of destruction until the employment of torturers is no radical step and the men and women hired for the job merely reflect the attitudes of the larger society."
pg 113
"One of the bleakest views on the effectiveness of torture was given to me by Don Dzagulones, who served as an interrogator with the American Division of the United States Army in Vietnam and who witnessed and participated in torture.
In an interview in August 1995, he told me that he could not recall a single incident in which torture was used to a positive end. 'If it happened, I am certainly not aware of it. Like prisoner X comes in, you beat the living snot out of him. He tells you about a Viet Cong ambush that is going to happen tomorrow, you relay the information to the infantry guys, and they counter-ambush and the good guys win and the bad guys lose, all because you tortured a prisoner. Never happened. Not to my knowledge. And you don't get any more functional as an interrogator than I was. i mean I was the bottom rung, you don't get any lower, this is it, this is the front line for interrogators, that's where i was. So my experiences aren't universal, but they were at the nitty-gritty level, down at the base. We started the ball rolling.'
Dzangulones believes that torture did generate reports, and reports pleased the chain of command."
pg 182
"Thus the forces unleashed by a man only doing his job, a man simply following orders, a man who may not know even the name of his victim, are extraordinarily powerful. Long after the torture and his or her prey are dead, the acts committed in a hidden place--perhaps in a matter of a few minutes or hours-- live on. The man who feels 'nothing personal' against his victim, who takes comfort in the belief that he is not as bad as some other torturer, who believes that he was not so bad because his victim did not die, never sees the extent of his damage, never considers that he has assaulted generations yet unborn."
pg 211
“'In this case, it was a very intelligent soldier, they knew about Kfar Kassem, they learned about it in school, but because they were so involved in the events, they saw no red light, no hearts, no nothing. And the argument was that it was a very illegal order, that you can see from one kilometer away that you are not supposed to do it. When you read it in the paper, when you see it in the TV, you say, 'That's obvious.' But if you talk to the soldier, you see it is not so obvious.
'But I think what is interesting here is not the torture itself. What is interesting is how good people, good teenagers, form good families from a good kibbutz, wit the political ideals of the Left, do a thing like this. At the time they got the order, they did not say, 'It's bad and I have to do it.' They did not say, 'It's bad and I must do it or else someone will kill me.' They did not say, 'It's bad and I don't want to do it.' They did it, and just when they were twenty-five they said, 'Oh, what a mistake it was. You are not allowed to do what we did, and I don't know how I didn't catch it at the time that it happened.'
'I see Omri—he is very good, he cannot harm a fly-- and he did it, and today he can't understand why. And he says, 'It was a mistake and I hope that I will have the power not to do it again.' He doesn't say that because he was punished—he got away clean. That is what is interesting. That you can drive him to some situation where he will do it.
'I had great arguments with omri. He told me, 'If you had some through the paratroopers, and I had gone into MPI, you would have done it and I would have investigated it.' Like all destiny, it is not how clever you are.
'I have an advantage on you because I lived it and I think about it a lot. And after all those years, this is what remains in my head—that you can take a good farmer—when he was fourteen, he was driving a tractor, a John Deere, on the kibbutz—and you can train him, tell him to do something, and he will do it. Everybody, even me. I didn't do it because I went to the MPI and they told me in school, 'This is good. His is no good,' but I think maybe it can happen to me. And if it happened to me for the first time when I was a colonel, I would find myself in jail. And maybe that I what happened to Yehuda Meir. Maybe he is not a bad guy.'”
pg 240
“I found I did not have to journey far to learn that torture is something we abhor only when it is done to someone we like, preferably someone we like who lives in another country.”
pg 243
“When a dictatorship is overthrown by a democratic regime, torture squads typically elude punishment because the new government is not entirely secure. After the junta fell in Argentina, for example, the new government lived in constant fear of a coup; the leaders of the ruling junta were prosecuted, but to avoid riling the armed forced further, there was no great purge of torturers, no indictments of whole companies of men. In other countries in which civilian governments have taken over from a regime that practices torture, the new leaders, seeing the need for order and continuity, have decided it was not practical to replace every judge, prosecutor, and policeman who held office during the dark ages; as a result, the bureaucracy that supported or tolerated torture remains in place, a bureaucracy understandably not interested in investigating the sins of the past. In other nations where torture has been systematic, reform governments have become convinced that what their country needs is reconciliation and healing, that prosecution of torturers would once again polarize society, that the best course is to avoid indictments for human rights violations. Other liberating governments have declined to prosecute either because they quickly find the torturer's tools quite useful or because the liberators have a history of torture themselves.”
pg 244
“In various nations in which notorious regimes have fallen, there has been a public acknowledgment that people were tortured. In democracies of long standing in which torture has taken place however, denial takes hold and official acknowledgment is extremely slow in coming, if it appears at all. The response of those societies is fairly predictable and can be charted in thematic, if not chronological, stages.
Consider, for example, the British reaction to the revelations they they were torturing the Northern Irish in 1971. The first stage of response was absolute and complete denial, accompanied by attacks on those who exposed the treatment. Northern Irish Prime Minister Brian Faulkner announced that there had been 'no brutality of any kind.' The London Sunday Times was denounced for printing 'the fantasies of terrorists.'
The second stage was to minimize the abuse. The government referred to it not as torture but as 'interrogation in depth.' Home Secretary Reginald Maulding proclaimed that there was no 'permanent lasting injury whatever, physical or mental, to any of the men.' The majority report of the Parker Commission proclaimed that any mental disorientation should disappear within hours, and, if it didn't, it might be the men's own fault, the product of anxiety caused by 'guilty knowledge' and 'fear of reprisals' from comrades for having allegedly given information. In the Compton Report, Sir Edmund Compton and his colleagues concluded that part of the torture had been done for the men's own good: the hooding kept the prisoners from identifying each other, thus preserving each man's security. The beating of Joe Clark's hands had not occurred; his hands had been massaged by guards in order to restore circulation. The guards who forced men to perform strenuous exercises were merely trying to keep the prisoners warm.
A third stage is to disparage the victims. Lord Carrington judged them to be 'thugs and murders', while Reginald Maulding proclaimed, 'It was necessary to take measures to fight terrorists, the murderous enemy. We must recognize them for what they are. They are criminals who wish to impose their own will by violence and terror.' Yet after extensive torture and ostensibly extensive confessions about their acts of 'violence and terror', none of the hooded men were charged with any crime.
A fourth stage is to justify the treatment on the grounds that it was effective or appropriate under the circumstances. Lord Balniel, junior minister of defense, said that there was no evidence of torture, ill-treatment, or brainwashing, and that the methods employed had produced ;invaluable' information about a brutal, callous, and barbaric enemy. Compton proclaimed that the five techniques had been used on the men because it was 'operationally necessary to obtain [information] as rapidly as possible in the interest of saving lives.' On November 21, 1971, the Sunday Times poked holes in the apologists' claims, pointing out that if the interrogation methods used on the hooded men 'were approved for use in any British police station, where the need for information is sometimes just as urgent as in Ulster, there would be universal outrage.' The Sunday Times editorial staff dismissed the claim that cruel treatment was justified if it saved lives. How can you be sure, the paper asked, that the prisoner has the information you seek, that the lack of information will indeed mean someone will die, and that cruel methods extract reliable information? The claim that lives were saved became even more suspect as time passed. The IRA was invigorated by new recruits inspired by the cruel treatment accorded the Catholic community, and in the calendar year following the introduction of internment, the number of shootings rose by 605 percent, the number of armed robberies increased 441 percent, and the number of deaths rose 268 percent.
A fifth component of a torturing society's defense is to charge that those who take up the cause of h tortured are aiding the enemies of the state. So when the Republic of Ireland persisted in its suit against the United Kingdom on behalf of the victims, the guardian argues that the republic's own government was 'torturing Northern Ireland' by 'force feeding the Provisionals [the Provisional IRA] with propaganda.'
A sixth defense is that the torture is no longer occurring, and anyone who raises the issue is therefore 'raking up the past.' Northern Ireland Secretary Merlyn Rees leveled that charge at the Irish government when it persisted in its pursuit of the victims' cause five years after their ordeal. Fifteen years later, there was widespread support for throughout the United Kingdom for the War Crimes Bill, which became law in May 1991 and which allowed for the prosecution of former Nazi officials for crimes committed fifty years earlier. (Lord Carrington and former Prime Minister Edwin Heath opposed the bill). It is always easier to see torture in another country than in one's own.
A seventh component of a torturing bureaucracy is to put the blame on a few bad apples, In defending themselves before the European Court, the British proclaimed that it was not an administrative practice, but rather a few men exceeding their orders. If this had been the case, however, there would seem to be no reason why the torturers could not have been publicly named and prosecuted.
An eighth stage in a society's rationalization of its policy of torture is the common torturer's defense, presented to me by most of the former torturers I interviewed, that someone else does or has done much worse things. When the subject of the hooded men arose, it was common for the British government to spokesman and many other editorial writers to respond by denouncing the IRA for its callous campaign of random murder, as if that justified the torture of randomly chosen men who, on the whole, were not members of the IRA. In the wake of the European Commission decision labeling the five techniques torture, the Times of London hastened to point out that Britain should not be 'lumped together with regimes past of present in Greece, Brazil, Iran, Argentina.' The Times argued that the techniques employed by those regimes put the victim in terror of the continuation of pain, and that the terror forced the victim to submit to the interrogator. The British techniques, the Times said, were not as evil because they were not designed to induce terror, but rather to induce a state of mental disorientation so that the victim's will to resist was lost.
A final rationalization of a torturing nation is that the victims will get over it. In a 1982 interview, General Harry Tuzo, the Oxford-educated commander of the army in Northern Ireland at the time Jim Auld and others were tortured, claimed that the victims, who in Tuzo's words had suffered not torture but 'acute discomfort and humiliation', had been 'very well compensated and looked after.' 'I personally would have thought,' Tuzo said, 'that they had got over it by now.' Similarly, General Jaques Massu, the French commander who throughout his life staunchly defended the widespread sue of torture by his troops during the Algerian war, dismissed the pains suffered by Henri Alleg, the European-Jew who wrote a book about his experience as a victim of Masu's policy (The Question, George Brazziler 1958). Massu saw Alleg in 1970, thirteen years after he was tortured, and based non that viewing discerned that the torture suffers was in 'reassuringly vigorous condition.'”
pg 252
“One small study of people who helped Jews during the Holocaust...found evidence to indicate that altruistic behavior was related to three personality traits: a spirit of adventurousness, an intense identification with a parent who set a high standard of moral conduct, and a sense of being socially marginal. In London’s small sample, the spirit of adventurousness was perhaps best exemplified by a man whose prewar hobby was to race motorcycles on courses that required driving over narrow boards that spanned deep ditches. Once the war began, that man and his friends got a kick out of putting sugar in the gas tanks of German army vehicles, a practice that disabled the engines. The identification with a parent with high moral standards was prominent in the case of a Seventh-Day Adventist minister from the Netherlands whose father had gone to jail for his beliefs; the minister described himself as mildly anti-Semitic, but during the war he organized a large-scale operation for rescuing Jews, believing simply that it was a Christian’s duty. That minister, who belonged to a religious group with an extremely small number of followers in Holland, was also cited as an example of what the researchers called, ‘social marginality’: a social separateness, a feeling of being an outsider, that seemed to allow the rescuers to have less fear about losing their attachment to the majority group. One highly effective German rescuer, also part of London’s sample, had been a stutterer as a child and in an interview confessed that he had always felt friendless. The residents of the French village of Le Chambon, who saved thousands of Jews during the war, also had a certain social marginality: they were Huguenots in overwhelmingly Catholic France."
pg 254
"In his book The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence, Staub argues that helping is infectious, that helpful bystanders, if they are not devalued by the perpetrators and inactive bystanders, break the uniformity of views, chip away at widespread antagonism toward a particular group, affirm the humanity of the victims, call attention to values disregarded by perpetrators and passive bystanders, and make it clear that persecution can have consequences for the persecutor. Staub points out that the citizens of Le Chambon seemed to have a profound effect on the Vichy police charged with rounding up the Jews: anonymous callers, believed to be the policemen, warned the local pastor of impending raids.”
October 28, 2020
It seems wrong to say Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People is a "good book" - it is an amazing piece of journalism. John Conroy focuses on torture in three contexts: Northern Ireland, Israel and the Chicago Police abuse scandal in the United States. Without passing judgement, he looks at how countries define torture (or refuse to define behavior as torture) and in some cases he is able to interview the torturers. He doesn't allow the reader to feel that torture is something done by other people in other places, but rather actions that can be done by ordinary educated people in a variety of countries.
It really should be standard reading for anyone looking at the political, ethical and moral implication of torture.
It really should be standard reading for anyone looking at the political, ethical and moral implication of torture.
January 29, 2026
This book is a necessary shock. It violently dismantles the comfortable lie that so-called "advanced" nations are beyond such brutality. The writer's cool, factual tone makes the horrors he describes even more disturbing. While I respect his attempt at neutrality, his greatest service may be unintentional: he forces the world to witness a sliver of the Palestinian people's endless suffering. However, I fundamentally disagree with the book's implied idea that anyone, under the right pressure, could become a torturer. This is a dangerous fantasy. Torture is not a universal human flaw. It is a conscious choice, made possible only by first believing another group of people is inferior. You would not torture your brother. The true poison is the belief in "us" and "them." That division is the seed of all war and torture. This book proves the machinery exists. But we must never confuse the machinery with the moral choice to turn it on.
July 7, 2014
1. We don't torture and shame on you for saying it. 2. Ok, maybe we're a little rough, but it's not torture and it is for their own good. 3. It's their own fault they're here. 4. What we've done has provided invaluable information saving thousands of lives. No, we can't reveal any of that, of course. State security and all that. 5. And you who protest, maybe you should be next, since you are obviously vile enemies of the state. 6. Any, it's all in the past and no use bringing all those hard feelings up. Ahead, I say, forward! 7. If anyone went too far, well, it was only a few bad apples. 8. If you think what we've done is bad, just look at _____________'s done! Fill in the blank 9. Really, those persons "interrogated" ought to just get over themselves.
Hey, but most of us are neither victims of torture nor torturers. We just sit around and silently allow our government to do it. In the chapter "Bystanders," Conroy lists three attributes of altruistic persons. Besides a sense of adventurousness and a parent who set a high moral standard, he mentions "a sense of being socially marginal." Perhaps we Christians ignore renditions and torture and indiscriminate and anonymous imprisonment because we're the big dogs now. We don't know what it's like to powerless, under the boot. Pretty sad. Last lines in this startling historical and tragically prescient book- "It seems a very small leap to argue that torture is the perfect crime. There are exceptions, yes, but in the vast majority of cases, only the victim pays."
Hey, but most of us are neither victims of torture nor torturers. We just sit around and silently allow our government to do it. In the chapter "Bystanders," Conroy lists three attributes of altruistic persons. Besides a sense of adventurousness and a parent who set a high moral standard, he mentions "a sense of being socially marginal." Perhaps we Christians ignore renditions and torture and indiscriminate and anonymous imprisonment because we're the big dogs now. We don't know what it's like to powerless, under the boot. Pretty sad. Last lines in this startling historical and tragically prescient book- "It seems a very small leap to argue that torture is the perfect crime. There are exceptions, yes, but in the vast majority of cases, only the victim pays."
July 4, 2010
A journalistic type account of three instances of torture, two of them carried out by, if not the "ordinary people" of the title, at least people who generally don't cause severe mental or physical pain to punish or get information by someone in their control, which is a shortened version of the definition of torture under the United Nations Torture Convention. Those two take place on the West Bank during the intifada and carried out by members of the IDF and on the south side of Chicago by Chicago police officers. Some of the IDF soldiers, who were ordered to break the arms and legs of Palestinians targeted by the intelligence service, refused to take part in the beatings while the maltreatment of the suspects in Chicago happened without the knowledge of most of the officers involved.
The third was done by police and British Army soldiers in Northern Ireland in some of the places that became synonymous with mistreatment of prisoners, murder by government officials and regular coverups, places like the Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast which can't really be attributed to ordinary (i.e. innocent or at least generally innocent) people.
The third was done by police and British Army soldiers in Northern Ireland in some of the places that became synonymous with mistreatment of prisoners, murder by government officials and regular coverups, places like the Crumlin Road Jail in Belfast which can't really be attributed to ordinary (i.e. innocent or at least generally innocent) people.
August 8, 2008
This book looks at torture both in U.S. and internationally by tracking three cases: the torture of 14 Irish men by the U.K. in Northern Ireland in 1971, the torture by beating of Palestinians near Nablus in 1988 by Israel, and the torture of criminal suspects in the 1970s and 1980s by the Chicago P.D. These become the entryways into how torture arises and is, generally, unchallenged in society. (We have only to look at the U.S. since 9/11.)
The author looks into how ordinary people, who are not monsters, do monstrous things, and how people rationalize torture and fail to intervene.
Above all, this book is valuable because of the obvious humanity, and even-handedness, of the author. He refuses to ignore the humanity of even those who commit barbaric acts. I'll be paraphrasing an old cliché here, but if you might be inclined to read even just one book on torture, this would do very well as that one.
The author looks into how ordinary people, who are not monsters, do monstrous things, and how people rationalize torture and fail to intervene.
Above all, this book is valuable because of the obvious humanity, and even-handedness, of the author. He refuses to ignore the humanity of even those who commit barbaric acts. I'll be paraphrasing an old cliché here, but if you might be inclined to read even just one book on torture, this would do very well as that one.
August 1, 2016
I read this for a college class that examined the history, policy context and ethical connotations of torture. We read about 7 books and a myriad of articles, but this one by far made the biggest impression. I can honestly say that I would've read this book even if it hadn't been assigned; I gave it to my mom and she too is loving it. It is very well written; his profession shines through in the text, as (unlike many of the other readers) he makes it engaging, current, and achieves a great balance between the different stories. His field work was obviously extensive, and he does a marvelous job showing different perspectives and interviewing both torturers and victims. I believe anyone interested in the subject of Torture, politics, history, ethics, and basically any other social science should read this book. It will provide a new layer of understanding and depth to many current issues.
February 1, 2015
Tremendous. Pulls no punches in laying blame, but that blame, responsibility is vastly more complex and muddy that I could have imagined.
Speaks to how anyone can be complicit in acts of torture, but also shows how these same aspects of the human psyche can mean almost anyone can be complicity in other terrible acts, such as genocide. Even tries to get at what kind of person might be less likely to participate in torture or genocide, though I would have liked a deeper exploration of that.
A disturbing read. You may find yourself very uncomfortable by the end, inevitably questioning whether you yourself might do something like this.
(How I rate: 5 stars is literally perfect, or so good as to overwhelm any imperfections. 4 stars is excellent. 3 stars is good. 2 stars is barely readable. 1 star is unreadable.)
Speaks to how anyone can be complicit in acts of torture, but also shows how these same aspects of the human psyche can mean almost anyone can be complicity in other terrible acts, such as genocide. Even tries to get at what kind of person might be less likely to participate in torture or genocide, though I would have liked a deeper exploration of that.
A disturbing read. You may find yourself very uncomfortable by the end, inevitably questioning whether you yourself might do something like this.
(How I rate: 5 stars is literally perfect, or so good as to overwhelm any imperfections. 4 stars is excellent. 3 stars is good. 2 stars is barely readable. 1 star is unreadable.)
April 19, 2011
Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People is a riveting book that exposes the potential in each of us for acting unspeakably. John Conroy sits down with torturers from several nations and comes to understand their motivations. His compelling narrative has the tension of a novel. He takes us into a Chicago police station, two villages in the West Bank, and a secret British interrogation center in Northern Ireland, and in the process we are exposed to the experience of the victim, the rationalizations of the torturer, and the seeming indifference of the bystander. The torture occurs in democracies that ostensibly value justice, due process, and human rights, and yet the perpetrators and their superiors escape without punishment, revealing much about the dynamics of torture.
August 24, 2011
A gripping read. I started it 5 days ago. It's a really intense look at 3 case studies of torture from within "developed" countries: Britain, Israel, and the United States. The author is a great writer and within the first couple pages of the book I was hooked. His analysis is interesting as are the case studies. He does a good job of portraying both the complexity of the issue and the simplicity. He talks to both victims and torturers and looks at a wide variety of sources to tell his story about these atrocities. In the end though, it seems like the larger population is more apt to side with torturers and torturers are more likely to be protected by the "democratic" states that commanded them to commit their brutality. I highly recommend this book. Amazing.
January 16, 2012
I had to read a few chapters for a class and found that I ended up reading the entire book. the title really speaks for itself. I found it very interesting to read about ordinary people placed in stressful situations and how they took on specific roles. Just as a heads up it is a little graphic when describing the methods of torture.
June 16, 2018
Kind of stiff/academic for such a harrowing topic, but I guess that's probably the best approach. I mostly was interested in the Burge/Chicago sections, but there were some interesting insights into the psychology of torturers.
Also, this was written in 2000. I can't imagine how worse things got after 9/11.
Also, this was written in 2000. I can't imagine how worse things got after 9/11.
November 3, 2007
For all those people who think they could never be unspeakably cruel to another this is an eye opening look at how is it is torture. It has become especially important in light of the current political climate.
September 28, 2007
Makes you appreciate the dumb luck you were born into - these stories of ordinary people being tortured (and torturing others) is incredible.
October 6, 2012
Just started but cannot put down…fabulous yet chilling account of a tragic reality.
February 4, 2024
The book discusses three cases of torture in different nations (Ireland, Israel and the USA). For each of them there is an in depth analysis of the act of torture itself, the victims, the perpetrators, the way the government or the judiciary have evaluated and processed the cases and the way society reacted to it.
For me, it was an interesting and informative as well as depressing read.
Before reading this, I knew nothing of the three cases described in this book. (Clearly, I was aware of police brutality in the United States and even in Ireland in the 1970’s, but the specific cases illustrated were new to me.)
The accounts of the victims as well as the ones of their torturers were fascinating and heartbreaking to read.
The author's conclusion is a sobering one: torture can happen everywhere, and the perpetrators almost never face charges for their acts. What a horrifying and infuriating thought.
For me, it was an interesting and informative as well as depressing read.
Before reading this, I knew nothing of the three cases described in this book. (Clearly, I was aware of police brutality in the United States and even in Ireland in the 1970’s, but the specific cases illustrated were new to me.)
The accounts of the victims as well as the ones of their torturers were fascinating and heartbreaking to read.
The author's conclusion is a sobering one: torture can happen everywhere, and the perpetrators almost never face charges for their acts. What a horrifying and infuriating thought.
July 16, 2024
John Conroy is a heroic reporter. Over decades of reporting, he single-handedly broke the story about the Chicago police commander who oversaw the torture of at least 118 men into false confessions that resulted in lengthy sentences. The wrongfully convicted have won over $100 million in settlements from Chicago and the surrounding county. Throughout his reporting, Conroy could not help but wonder about the moral fiber of the detectives who inflicted the torture. He then looked at those involved in torture in two other Western democratic nations, Northern Ireland and Israel. In some cases, he found humanity behind the inhumane behavior and tolerance for it in the respective societies. Written in 2000, the book casts a prescient shadow over what would transpire after 9/11 and October 7.
April 27, 2020
Here’s a fresh take on torture: three separate and specific incidents viewed from the perspective of both the perpetrators and the victims (at least to the extent possible; author John Conroy had a little trouble reaching the torturer in one case and the tortured in another). Conroy’s three incidents provide a solid cross-section of the craft of torment, from systematic, sophisticated abuse to random (but government-sanctioned) thuggery. The organization is a trifle odd at times, but otherwise this is a well-written work on an important topic.
August 10, 2023
An excellent choice of three-varying case studies that examines the intricacies and surprisingly low-barrier to entry to the field of torture. Great qualitative research that is almost prophetic in its pre-9/11 analysis of state-sanctioned violence. Harrowing personal accounts and diligent research and follow-up.
Read
August 5, 2020Couldn't get through it
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 20, 2017
Good book.
August 23, 2022
John Conroy reports on three incidences of torture: one in Northern Ireland, one in Israel, and one in Chicago, and ties what happened in these places to how torture presents as a whole.
This one was great. I really loved the organization, first of all—chapters alternated from Northern Ireland to Israel to Chicago, and the fourth was general information about torture, like history or what the effects are on victims.
I wasn’t familiar with any of the cases in this book besides having heard of the hooded men before, so I learned a lot, even though most of it was very depressing. I did lots of highlighting and wrote lots of notes in the margins, more than I have in a very long time. Noticed so many similarities in how the United States’ prisoner abuse in the war on terror was carried out. Shame no one at the Pentagon read this book and learned what not to do.
I did have to fact check a couple times, most importantly during Conroy’s assertion that torture was why France won the Battle of Algiers, and I was under the impression that torture didn’t work to provide actionable intelligence. (Thankfully, Darius Rejali wrote an article addressing this exact question, so that was very helpful.) Also not a fan of how the bibliography was in paragraph form instead of a list or footnotes, but I can live with it.
Great book, highly recommend. Very useful for my research.
This one was great. I really loved the organization, first of all—chapters alternated from Northern Ireland to Israel to Chicago, and the fourth was general information about torture, like history or what the effects are on victims.
I wasn’t familiar with any of the cases in this book besides having heard of the hooded men before, so I learned a lot, even though most of it was very depressing. I did lots of highlighting and wrote lots of notes in the margins, more than I have in a very long time. Noticed so many similarities in how the United States’ prisoner abuse in the war on terror was carried out. Shame no one at the Pentagon read this book and learned what not to do.
I did have to fact check a couple times, most importantly during Conroy’s assertion that torture was why France won the Battle of Algiers, and I was under the impression that torture didn’t work to provide actionable intelligence. (Thankfully, Darius Rejali wrote an article addressing this exact question, so that was very helpful.) Also not a fan of how the bibliography was in paragraph form instead of a list or footnotes, but I can live with it.
Great book, highly recommend. Very useful for my research.
July 17, 2014
Perhaps this speaks more to my inability to sustain attention for long periods of time, but I would've preferred slightly less depth on the three cases of torture, and more cases touched on. My favourite chapters, though, were the general ones, hearing from torturers, hearing from victims. But these are just personal preferences, and definitely not criticisms on the book, which was an incredible, and alarming, piece of journalism.
October 27, 2007
reading this book, i realized there should be a separate rating for 'enjoyment.' i liked the book; i did not enjoy it. this is a timely and important subject, and the unspeakable acts are just that. the book left me overwhelmed by the human capacity for cruelty.
March 3, 2009
A very eye-opening novel that shows case studies from the point of views of the victims and the torturers.
March 10, 2009
where are the damn half stars... i love john conroy. i think he got fired from the chicago reader...
May 29, 2010
fuck the reader for laying him off....
June 6, 2011
A little lengthy in parts but overall a well-rounded picture of the double-victimization of the tortured (once by their perpetrators and again by shortcomings of governmental systems)
May 30, 2012
disturbing, without a doubt, but need to face society's ills sometimes....
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