UN International Day in Support of Victims of Torture

The following comes from the Centre for Victims of Torture (CVT). This is what you need to know about how torture is actually used in the real world of despots and repressive regimes. Clearly the current US administration lives in a whole other universe. (One might describe it as a fantasy land.)

What’s At Stake:

Based on CVT’s experience with torture survivors and understanding the systems in which they have been abused, CVT believes it is important that discussions about the U.S. use of torture and cruel, inhuman, degrading treatment not be shaped by speculation but rather through an understanding of how torture is actually used in the world.

Torture does not yield reliable information.

Well-trained interrogators, within the military, the FBI, and the police have testified that torture does not work, is unreliable and distracting from the hard work of interrogation. Nearly every client at the Center for Victims of Torture, when subjected to torture, confessed to a crime they did not commit, gave up extraneous information, or supplied names of innocent friends or colleagues to their torturers. Such extraneous information distracts, rather than supports, valid investigations.

Torture will not be used only against the guilty.

Our clients are living testimony that once used, torture becomes a fishing expedition to find information. The estimate from the Red Cross was that at least 80 percent of those imprisoned at Abu Ghraib, for example, should never have been arrested, but were there because it was easier to arrest persons than to let them go (people feared letting go a terrorist more than protecting the innocent).

Torture has never been confined to narrow conditions.

Torture has often been justified by reference to a small number of people who know about the “ticking time bomb,� but in practice, it has always been extended to a much wider population.

Psychological torture is damaging.

When torture is defined as strictly a physical act, many believe that psychological coercion is okay. CVT’s clients say it was the psychological forms of torture that were the most debilitating over a long period. The source of their nightmares, 15 and 20 years later, was the mock executions or hearing others being tortured.

Stress and duress techniques are forms of torture.

Every democratic nation’s court system and international court which has reviewed them has concluded that they are forms of torture. (Source: Judgment on the Interrogation Methods applied by the GSS, Israeli Supreme Court, September 6, 1999)


We cannot use torture and still retain the moral high ground.

The arguments we hear are not so different in form and content from those used by the repressive governments of CVT’s clients, and which the U.S. has refused to accept from other nations that have used torture to combat their real or perceived enemies. Torture is not an effective or efficient producer of reliable information. But it is effective and efficient at producing fear and rage, both in the individuals tortured and in their broader communities.

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