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Eric Fair served as an interrogator in Iraq working as a military contractor for the private security firm CACI. [...] Fair writes about feeling haunted by what he did, what he saw and what he heard in Iraq, from the beating of prisoners to witnessing the use of sleep deprivation, stress positions and isolation to break prisoners.
[...] Raad Hussein is bound to the Palestinian chair. His hands are tied to his ankles. The chair forces him to lean forward in a crouch, forcing all of his weight onto his thighs. It's as if he's been trapped in the act of kneeling down to pray, his knees frozen just above the floor, his arms pinned below his legs. He is blindfolded. His head has collapsed into his chest. He wheezes and gasps for air. There is a pool of urine at his feet. He moans: too tired to cry, but in too much pain to remain silent.
[...] Sleep deprivation, as I've said before, can be accomplished in a matter of hours. You can let someone go to sleep in a dark room with no windows, and you can wake them up in 15 or 20 minutes. They have no idea how long they've been asleep. And with no windows, they have no idea what time of day it is. You can let them go back to sleep, and you can wake them up in 20 minutes. They still have no idea. And they've since—within 45 minutes, they've lost all sense of time. Two or three hours later, you can convince this person that he's been living for four or five days, when it's really only been an hour.
[...] [The purpose of sleep deprivation:] The complete lack of hope. It is to strip away someone's hope and to insert a different way of thinking into their mind, which would be my mind into theirs, so that they're going to cooperate with me.
Part 1: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/7/a_torturer_s_confession_former_abu
Part 2: http://www.democracynow.org/2016/4/7/ex_abu_ghraib_interrogator_israelis_trained
(Score: 4, Informative) by inertnet on Sunday April 17 2016, @01:33AM
I absolutely condemn torture, but I can understand how someone can become a torturer. When I was young, my uncle used to tell me stories about how he was drafted as a young man and was sent to a war for 5 or 6 years, in a different part of the world. Right after WW2 many young men in my country were drafted and sent to Indonesia, which was a colony at the time. My uncle started out as a regular soldier, but because he quickly learned the language he was moved to intelligence. At first he didn't torture people, but after he had seen some of his buddies drop dead right beside him, he gradually changed and thought he could save lives by extracting information from captured spies, as he called them. He didn't give many details, and I didn't really want to hear any, but he mentioned that they used electricity on sensitive body parts. He had lots of great stories and I could listen to him for hours. I knew other veterans from that war and none of them ever talked about what they'd seen, not even to their own wives. When they came back home they were told not to tell anything because nobody would believe them anyway. It was a very brutal war, a couple of years ago an Indonesian survivor (not my uncle) told me a story about a time when he was in a jail cell with 25 to 30 other people, it was too crowded to sit or lie down. One day their captors executed everyone in the cell next to them and told them that the next day it would be their turn. They agreed to attack their captors the next day as soon as they'd open the door, because they'd die anyway. But they didn't need to, because one person from the other cell had survived and opened their cell during the night. It's not hard to imagine that people turn to torture if those kinds of things are your daily reference. Torture is a horrible thing, but not unimaginable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 17 2016, @03:29AM
What point are you trying to make? Are you merely giving us an example of the type of mentality a torturer can have, or are you trying to justify the use of torture even though you also say that it is horrible?
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Sunday April 17 2016, @10:52AM
My point is that many people can turn out to be torturers when their circumstances change, it is human nature and history proves it. Probably including a number of those who are condemning it in this discussion. I don't have scientific data, but I guess that at least 20% of people have it in them without knowing it. It's an observation, not a justification.