By John Conroy
Knopf. 304 pp. $26

Reviewed by John Schwartz, who is a writer on technology issues for The Washington Post.

Sunday, March 26, 2000

It would be comforting to believe that people who commit acts of torture are monsters. John Conroy is out to dispel any such comfort. In Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture, he says that there might be a little monster in all of us -- and makes a case that could leave many readers questioning their most basic beliefs about human nature.

The book focuses on three well-documented, modern-day incidents that turn the stomach and trouble the soul. The first is the case of 14 Northern Irish men tortured by the British army in 1971. Besides beating the prisoners, the soldiers forced them to stand spread-eagled with their arms above their heads to prop themselves up against a wall -- a posture calculated to cause excruciating pain over time. Their captors kept them standing and awake for days on end and denied them access to food or a toilet; the prisoners had to urinate and defecate on themselves. The men were hooded to cause disorientation and isolation, and subjected to continuous, painfully loud noise. After more than a week, the treatment -- cribbed, apparently, from the KGB -- had induced a psychotic state in the men, and some could not use their hands at all.

The second of Conroy's incidents involves the savage clubbing of 20 Palestinians to quell rock-throwing protests in Israel's West Bank in 1988, part of a policy of dealing with the Arab Intifada uprising characterized by Yitzhak Rabin at the time as "force, might and beatings." The soldiers administering the "punishment" had gotten explicit orders to break the men's arms and legs, and they did their job so effectively that many of their wooden billy clubs broke.

The third is the saga of Andrew Wilson, a criminal whose confession in a cop-killing investigation was extracted in 13 hours of custody by a much-decorated police commander, Jon Burge. Conroy covered this case closely for the Chicago Reader over the 15 years it wound through the courts. The policeman used a powerful, hand-cranked electric generator with alligator clips attached to Wilson's ears, nostril and fingers. In court, Wilson later testified that "the pain just stays in your head

. . . it's just like this light here like when it flickers and flickers . . . and your teeth constantly grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds." The policeman also used a device like a cattle prod on Wilson's genitals.

Each of the cases is a far cry from the mutilating excesses of Spanish Inquisitors and Nazi "researchers." And many would argue with Conroy's characterization of the three incidents as torture -- especially the perpetrators. The British government took years to acknowledge that its treatment of the prisoners constituted abuse, and continues to deny that the "five techniques" treatment constituted torture. The Israeli government -- citing the British case -- also denies that the 1988 beatings should be called torture. The city of Chicago, as well, insisted that its officers had not engaged in torture -- that is, until it tried to wriggle out of paying legal damages. At that point the city argued in a brief that any torture that might have been committed "cannot, as a matter of sound public policy and logic, be found within the scope of [duty of] Chicago police officers."

Conroy discusses those cavils but nonetheless treats the incidents unambiguously. He uses the tale of each as a way to discuss in chilling detail how such acts are performed and whether the practice is effective for getting information (not really, he suggests). He also examines the lasting damage the process inflicts on the victims. But most impressively, he asks what sort of people would do such a thing in the first place.

The most compelling parts of the book are Conroy's interviews with the "ordinary people" of his title. Some torturers get extensive training and conditioning to see their prisoners as subhuman. But for many, it's simply part of the job description; they are living examples of Hannah Arendt's phrase "the banality of evil." He cites the series of studies performed by Yale researchers showing that just about anyone can be persuaded to push a button that will shock another person, even at levels they believe to be dangerous.

Conroy travels to meet several admitted torturers, and finds them uncannily normal, pleasant and even charming. He has much in common with Bruce Moore-King, who regularly used torture methods against adults and children in the 1970s to help preserve the white government's power in the former Rhodesia. Chicago cop Burge is self-deprecating and funny; "I enjoyed his company," Conroy writes.

Conroy approaches the torturers not as monsters but as fellow human beings -- and appears to have put them at ease. How else can you explain the horrifying things they say to him? "I am a victim, too," says Hugo Garcia, a Uruguayan who favored the submarino method of dunking his victims head-first into water tanks, repeatedly taking them to the brink of drowning. Garcia eventually tired of the work and moved to Norway, where he struggled to find work and ended up painting cars for a living. And then there's Omri Kochva, an Israeli soldier who supervised the Palestinian beatings. "Since the Holocaust, it really sounds bad when someone says, 'I got orders,' " he says. He adds that he is sorry it happened, but "it doesn't break my heart and I don't cry for the Arabs" -- a group of men he thought might never walk again after his night's work. He was "sorry not for the Arabs, but for me . . . for the soldiers, that we didn't stop at the time. It will never pass from my life."

With solemn indignation, Conroy describes the meandering path of justice in addressing the incidents. No one in England was ever held accountable for the maltreatment of the hooded men, though the victims did eventually receive some compensation. Yehuda Meir, the commander of Israel's Nablus region who gave the explicit orders, was eventually court-martialed, but no soldier who carried out the attack and no one above him in the chain of command was held responsible. And after 15 years, Wilson won a lawsuit against the city for his treatment (his $100,000 actually went to the family of the officer he had killed). Commander Burge was dismissed from the force; two other officers implicated in the incident were temporarily suspended. Torture, Conroy concludes, is "the perfect crime. There are exceptions, yes, but in the vast majority of cases, only the victim pays."

While these stories are told in measured prose, Conroy's anger suffuses every page. He saves his coldest rage, however, for any society that would ignore the crimes of its torturers or accept the official denials that such treatment has taken place. Conroy agonizes over the sad fact that, when presented with clear proof that torture has occurred, the public does not rise up in anger and disgust. Ultimately, then, he suggests, we all share the blame -- we are in league with the torturer.

Can torture ever be justified? As abhorrent as it is, many of us would forgive such measures in extreme cases -- say, to force a terrorist to disclose the location of a nuclear bomb that is about to go off. But the problem with torture, as Conroy shows, is that it is a seductive tool: Once a government allows it for some reason, you can bet it will be used for far more. The "hooded men" were not terrorists, and only a few of them were even affiliated with the Irish Republican Army. None of the Arabs at Nablus had been accused of terrorist acts. Cop-killer Wilson's attorneys compiled a list of 62 other people who claimed to have been tortured by Chicago's finest. When you've got a hammer, the old saying goes, everything looks like a nail. When you've got a thumbscrew, apparently, everything looks like a thumb.