The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
yn/content/article/2006/09/22/AR2006092201304.html

Does It Work?
President Bush says harsh interrogation tactics are
a key tool in the War on Terror. Two authors
consider the painful dilemma posed by his claim:

By Edwidge Danticat
Sunday, September 24, 2006; B01

MIAMI Afew years ago, as I worked on a documentary
film about torture survivors in exile from my native
Haiti, I met a young woman who under questioning by
a military officer was slapped until she became deaf
in one ear, was forced to chew and swallow a
campaign poster, and was kicked so hard in the
stomach by booted feet that she kept slipping in and
out of consciousness in a pool of her own urine and
blood. Another woman had an arm chopped off and her
tongue sliced in two before she was dumped in a mass
grave, miles from her home.

When I met these women, some time had passed since
their ordeals. But they could still feel the
hammering of the blows and hear the menacing voices,
threatening to drown them, dismember them and set
them on fire. The younger woman, Marie Carmel,
remembers thinking about her mother. Manman will
surely die if I'm killed, she thought. I have to
stay alive for her. Alerte, whose arm and tongue
were severed, kept thinking about her children as
she climbed out of the corpse-filled pit and crawled
to the side of the road where she found help. Both
had no idea how much pain they could endure until
then. They wanted to live, they remembered, to defy
their torturers, to tell their stories.

"There is no need for torture," wrote Jean-Paul
Sartre. "Hell is the other." Those women saw hell
and came back. However, neither one told their
torturers what they wanted to know. Marie Carmel did
not reveal the names of her fellow pro-democracy
activists. Alerte did not divulge the whereabouts of
her husband, who was the real object of her captors'
search.

For many who remember -- just as these women do, and
my own parents do -- what it means to live under a
dictatorial regime, a regime in which citizens must
leave work or school to witness public executions,
torture is not just an individual affliction but a
communal one. And now, when political leaders in the
United States are asking us as a society to consider
not only the legal and moral ramifications of
torture but its effectiveness, we are brought closer
to these regimes than we may think. If we are part
of all that has touched us, as Alfred Tennyson
wrote, then we are all endorsers of torture when it
is done in our name.

Torture aims for a single goal -- obtaining
information -- but it achieves a slew of others. For
one thing, it martyrizes the tortured. Think of the
old Christlike images of Che Guevara's corpse in
Bolivia -- or even of Christ himself.

While working on the documentary and researching the
novel it eventually inspired, I interviewed
torturers as well as their victims. I realized that
torture diminishes us all by numbing us to human
distress; the level of callousness in the society
rises, with once unimaginable acts suddenly charted
and rationalized.

"This is why we have this proverb," one repentant
torturer told me, " bay kou bliye pote mak sonje ."
The one who strikes the blow might easily forget,
but the one who wears the scars must remember.

When seemingly noble ideals -- after all, what can
be nobler than wanting to save lives? -- lead us to
torture, the path to the torture chamber can find
its way to our front door, just as it did for Marie
Carmel, Alerte and countless others before them.

"The people who kill and torture and tell lies in
the name of their sacred causes . . . " wrote Aldous
Huxley, "these are never the publicans and the
sinners. No, they're the virtuous, respectable men,
who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the
noblest ideals."

As a child growing up in a dictatorial state, I
always dreaded the pounding I heard at some of my
neighbors' doors at night, when many were yanked
from their beds never to be seen again. The lucky
ones returned from a pit that was as much a physical
place as a darkness that would always surround them.
They were missing an eye or some teeth; they showed
swelling that would take weeks to go down or shaking
that worsened over time. These markers of torment
first drew me to people such as Marie Carmel and
Alerte, women who could have been my mother or
myself.

When I first encounter men and women who've been
tortured, I notice their dramatic and disfiguring
scars. But eventually I recognize their hardened
core and, more often than not, their reinforced
defiance and renewed commitment to that for which
they were abused.

When I meet former torturers, they don't proudly
stand up and say, "Here I am, a torturer." Unless
they're infamous, they have sought to
compartmentalize their lives. At a lively game of
dominoes or across a family dinner table, they can
distance themselves from their past in a way that
their victims can never even attempt. Occasionally,
though, they are unwittingly exposed by a child who
might say, "Papa was in the military and worked in
such-and-such prison at such-and-such time." The
torturers squirm and change the subject, knowing
they've been unmasked.

Rare is the opportunity, as we seem to have now, for
the torturer to plot out methods in advance and in
public. Should a person be strapped to a board and
have water poured down his nose? Should she be
forced to stand for long periods of time in the cold
without being allowed to sleep? Should he be slapped
in the chest, face or belly? These are almost
novelistic questions with no more rational answers
than some haywire plot or dark verse.

After first reading it as a young girl newly escaped
from Jean-Claude Duvalier's dictatorship in Haiti, I
recently rediscovered a poem called "The Colonel" by
Carolyn Forché. The narrator describes dining with a
dictator who, after the luxurious meal, empties a
bag full of human ears on the table.

"I am tired of fooling around," he tells his
visitor. "As for the rights of anyone, tell your
people they can go [expletive] themselves."

He lifts his glass of wine, and with one sweep of
his arm, brushes the ears to the floor.

When the ears hit the ground -- like those of all my
disappeared neighbors, I imagine -- the narrator
notices that some of them are pressed to the floor
while others are catching "this scrap of his voice."
My fear is that when it is most needed, none of our
ears will bother to catch any voices at all. Then
will the tortured see any reason to live on? And if
they live, whom will they tell?

  Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian American writer, is the
author of "The Dew Breaker" (Knopf).