Long before 2001, the day September 11 held tremendous significance for friends of justice and democracy around the world. It was on September 11, 1973 that a U.S.-backed coup in Chile deposed the elected president, Salvador Allende, and began a 17-year reign of terror under General Augusto Pinochet. In the days immediately following the coup, 5,000 people were rounded up, herded into a Santiago stadium, tortured, and murdered.
Among them was the great singer of nueva cancíon, Victor Jara. In this video, he sings one of his best-loved pieces, Plegaria a un labrador ("Prayer to a Worker").
Now the Washington Post reports that a Chilean attorney is calling for the arrest of four men he believes are directly responsible for Jara's torture and murder. Will they be prosecuted? That remains to be seen.
But if Chile can prosecute torturers almost 40 years later, perhaps people in this country will find the courage to prosecute torturers whose crimes are only a few years old.
Perhaps we will also find the courage to close the prison at Guantánamo Bay, and to shut down CIA torture centers in Bagram, Afghanistan, Diego García, and around the world. Several groups in this country are working to make that happen, including the National Religious Campaign Against Tortureand Witness against Torture.
This January 11 - 22, Witness against Torture has planned a series of actions to close Guantánamo, including demonstrations and fasts in Washington. Click on the image on the left to see how you can get involved.
You might not expect a trip to the ER to make a person think about torture.
The ER at San Francisco General
On Monday I gave myself an impromptu lesson in the principle of inertia: if you're whizzing along on your bike and slam on the brakes, the bike will stop – but you won't.
I landed on my head, passed out, vomited all over the nice EMT people, had the presence of mind to explain that the color was due to my breakfast of blackberries, not blood, got strapped into a rigid board and spent the next 24 hours at San Francisco General Hospital. Two CT scans later, they decided my brain was not bleeding after all. They kept me overnight for monitoring and sent me home yesterday afternoon, a sadder and I hope wiser cyclist.
Last Friday I took a colleague’s liberation theology class for him, while he was at a conference. He’d asked me to talk about torture, particularly in the context of El Salvador’s wars in the 1980’s and 90’s.
“But be sure to show them some pictures,” he said. “Otherwise, they won’t really understand what you’re talking about.”
This request presented a two problems.
First, although the internet abounds with images of torture (a Google search will bring up hundreds of thousands in a few seconds), many of these are fictitious representations. They are recreations, artists’ renditions, the products of imagination. Unlike the monitory spectacle of public execution, today’s institutionalized state torture goes on in secret. The results of torture – the mutilated bodies of the tortured – do often “appear” in public places. But torture itself is private ritual. That privacy lies at the heart its mechanism: the sufferer has been cut off from all the usual landmarks – temporal, physical, and social – of ordinary life. She or he is alone; no one knows what is happening to her. Indeed one of the most profound forms of torture, as Atul Gawande has shown us, is solitary confinement.
The answer to this question may seem obvious, but it’s not. If it were, people in this country wouldn’t have been arguing about it for the last nine years. Is sleep deprivation torture? What about sexual humiliation? Waterboarding? Applying electrical current to a person’s body?
You might think this last suggestion would be torture by anybody’s definition. But you’d be wrong. Here’s Osvaldo Romo, Osvaldo Romo, a lower-echelon functionary of DINA, Chile’s security police in the early years of the Pinochet dictatorship, claiming that he never tortured anyone.
Welcome to my weekly blog about United States involvement in torture. It’s not a happy subject, and I don’t really like thinking or writing about it. But I’ve spent the last nine years studying torture, beginning with the first disappearances of people inside the United States in the days after September 11, 2001.
The answer to this question may seem obvious, but it’s not. If it were, people in this country wouldn’t have been arguing about it for the last nine years. Is sleep deprivation torture? What about sexual humiliation? Waterboarding? Applying electrical current to a person’s body?
Welcome to my weekly blog about United States involvement in torture. It’s not a happy subject, and I don’t really like thinking or writing about it. But I’ve spent the last nine years studying torture, beginning with the first disappearances of people inside the United States in the days after September 11, 2001.