A Personal Statement on My Own Experience With Torture

I will not pretend for a moment that I can know what it is like to be tortured by consummate terror professionals. But I can speak - briefly - about personal experience with torture and what I know it does to "elicit the truth".

My mother - posthumously, I was told by several shrinks that she was schizophrenic but whether she was or was not, I cannot say - had come herself from a most difficult life when she was widowed, at age 40, with still small children at home including myself who was four. This itself is sadly not so unusual. What came soon after, however, I'm told is more rare.

As a child, my mother placed a very high value on complete obedience and on "truth" (although, if she was indeed a schizophrenic, there's an explanation for why the truth was never satisfactory). As early as four, I recall my mother chasing us around the home with sharp implements (chef's knives, big meat forks) to get us to "confess" some transgression. I recall my head stuck in toilets and full bath tubs, my head pushed through a wall, forced to eat feces, handed a gun and told to either shoot a family cat or myself (I did neither), have Mom goad my younger brother to beat me up (which he continued to do after she died) and many other physical abuses to get the truth on subjects that a child between 4 and 10 is likely not going to express as clearly as an adult. I almost never got spanked.

Having been nearly drowned many times by a woman who was supposed to love me (and I believe did in her capacity) while she screamed for me to confess for something I either had never done or had not done in the manner in which she perceived it, I can tell you that sometimes, you just give up and say what you're expected to say.

You search for the appeasing answer rather than the true one ("I don't know" - "Why are you doing this since I don't know what you're talking about?") just to be able to breathe once more or to stop having your head slammed so harshly that you wonder if you will become brain damaged. (And, oddly enough, I'll tell you I prefered toilet "waterboarding" to the psychological abuse my mother mastered later.)

Of course, after a time, I learned that there was no right answer. If I admitted culpability or promised never to do something again that I had never actually done anyway, I got hurt and if I refused to say, I got hurt. So after awhile, I would just speak the truth (no, I didn't, or "yeah, I did") because I was going to pay for it anyway. I suspect those tortured under Bush and Rumsfeld's orders know this routine all too well.

Later, in high school, an elder classmate of mine, a slight and sweet boy named Peter Reilly (you can still find references about him along with some old movies and books) was "tortured" into giving a confession that he had killed his mother when he had not. He was convicted and then, miraculously, this verdict was set aside and Reilly released. Our prisons contain many Peter Reillys, people who could not stand up to interrogation or the techniques used to elicit confessions.

Even later, I investigated cases where "torture" of one kind or another was used to "get" information. Invariably, what was obtained from such methods just didn't hold up. Former CIA and military experts, among others, tell us this as well.

So I'm sorry. I do not believe that torture "works" to elicit correct information. In my personal experience, and everything I've read from psychological sources as well as military and security experts, torture doesn't "get the job done." It's not a means to an end. All it is, is torture and the complete and utter attempt to "break" another person.