“Get in,” someone said to him in Egyptian Arabic.
So he knew also that he was home.
He was nudged into a microbus, and a man got in beside him. The man must have seen Abu Omar’s bleeding wrists because he severed the plastic handcuffs, replaced them with metal cuffs, then wiped the blood with tissues. Abu Omar wanted to ask him to remove the cuffs from his ankles as well, but he was too scared. The microbus drove quickly through city streets—surely Cairo’s, he thought—for half an hour. When it stopped, he was ordered out and led into a building, where his feet were cut free. Someone began to examine his body. It seemed he was checking Abu Omar’s wounds, and Abu Omar was relieved to think the examiner might be a doctor. But the man did not linger over the wounds and presently began ripping the tape from Abu Omar’s head, every rip bringing with it a piece of skin or a tuft of beard. He screamed as blood trickled down his cheeks and onto his shirt. It took many rips to finish the job. Afterward he would say that of everything that happened to him in captivity, the tape was the thing for which he most hated the CIA.
His eyes, now uncovered, were again struck with the glare of light, and a man at his side ordered him to blink several times to adjust them. The man also shouted that Abu Omar was not to look at anything but the wall in front of him. He did as told but not before seeing three or four Egyptian men standing about the room. One of them removed the cuffs on his wrists, then made him take off his pajama-like clothes. He could see now that they were light gray and that their arms and legs had been cut off to make short pants and a short-sleeved shirt. In his earlier stupor, he hadn’t noticed they were cutoffs. His diaper was removed next, and he was given underwear and a blue prison uniform to put on, then his wrists and ankles were re-shackled. A man took many photographs of him—to Abu Omar, it seemed from every possible angle. When the photographer was done, a hood was pulled over Abu Omar’s head, and he was led to another room and made to sit in a chair. He sensed many people present, but only one spoke. The speaker said the interrogation would begin now, and he demanded to know Abu Omar’s name, occupation, and address, the names of his family members, how and why he had left Egypt, what he was doing in Italy, what he had done elsewhere. It had the makings of a long interrogation. But soon the man stopped and said, “There are two bashas in the room.” Basha is the Arabic of the Turkish pasha, an official of high rank. “One of them would like to talk to you.”
The basha stepped forward.
“Osama,” he said, “do you hear me well?”
“Yes, I do,” Abu Omar replied.
“I’ll ask you one question, and I need a short, decisive answer—only yes or no. Will you work for us? If you say yes, we will allow you to go back to Italy this moment.”
“No,” said Abu Omar, but he was desperate to plead his innocence and began to do so.
“Quiet!” the basha commanded. “Don’t say another word.”
On later occasions, Abu Omar would sometimes say the basha was an exceedingly senior official, probably Egypt’s minister of the interior, Habib El-Adly. But other times he would say he had no idea who the basha was.
The basha left, and Abu Omar was led out of the office through several corridors and into a cell. His blindfold and shackles were removed, and the door was shut behind him. He thought he could hear, very faintly, a muezzin making the adhan, the call to the first of Islam’s five daily prayers, which is held at dawn and is called fajr. The adhan is more song than proclamation—an admission of the power of music by a faith that is, by some interpretations, opposed to it—and it is beautiful even over the tinny loudspeakers that carry it across the great cities of the old caliphate. Cairo is at its quietest during the adhan of fajr, and so it is heard, if only in dreams, by all but a few of its twenty million inhabitants. Hearing it, Abu Omar fell asleep.
FILM AND TELEVISION have dulled brutality. Hardly a person alive has not seen a thousand fists to the jaw, clubs to the knee, boots to the groin. Nearly always the point of view is the beater’s, and a beater feels no pain. A pummeled gut is no more than a puff of wind expelled from a surprised mouth, a cracked nose no more than a thin line of blood trickling from a nostril, and in the next scene the expeller of wind and the trickler of blood will walk unbowed.
Reality bows a man. A single hard blow can send a liquid pain searing through a person and make him feel as if he is falling into an abyss. Several blows can brutally define his trunk for him, as if his skeleton has been etched in the medium of pain. A man who is about to be tortured senses as much: when pain is about to be endured, it becomes easier to imagine correctly, which is why awaiting pain is itself an anguish. The anguish will be all the greater if the awaiter lives in a place where torture is common, because he will have heard stories about others’ tortures. He may, for example, have heard of falanga, which is striking the soles of the feet with a rod and which causes an excruciation so permeating that victims have said it is as if someone stuck a knife in their brain stem. The pain may be minutely lessened by arching the feet, but after several blows the feet swell grotesquely and cannot be arched at all. Or the person awaiting torture may have heard of a prisoner who was made to stand barefoot on the edges of jagged cans so that the cans sliced into the soles of his feet until they bled dry. Or he may know of a victim whose hand was placed on a table and smashed methodically with a hammer, first the back of the hand proper, then the knuckles and bones of one finger, then another finger, and so on until no bone was left unshattered. He may also know of a woman who had her head pounded against the corner of a file cabinet until her skull was split and her brain bared. He may know of another woman whose child was dangled out a sixth-story window until she signed whatever her tormentors wanted her to sign. He may have heard of a man who was forced to watch his daughter raped or his father sodomized. Another man will have had ether injected into his scrotum, which feels like lighting a match inside the testicles. Another’s pubic hair will have been set on fire. Another will have had cockroaches inserted in his rectum. Another will have shared a cell with a cobra. Someone else will have been made to sit in a chair and have her upper torso shaken back and forth so quickly that she vomited, urinated, and defecated on herself. Another will have endured the same shaking and will have emerged as if lobotomized. Another will have had his hands cuffed behind his back, then the cuffs will have been connected to chains, which will have been thrown over a pulley and yanked so that he was lifted into the air until his arms were twisted out of their sockets—torture in its truest sense, since the word is derived from the Latin torquere, “to twist.” Another will have been dragged on her face over unfinished concrete. Another made to swallow large amounts of salt, then denied water for several days until he nearly died of thirst, then finally given a drink that will have turned out to be urine. Another will have had boiling water thrown on his feet. Another’s feet will have been submerged for hours in ice cubes. There are prisoners who have been soaked so long in vats, with only their heads sticking out, that when they were removed from the liquid their skin fell off and they died slow, painful deaths. There are places where the cat-o’-nine-tails is still used: the prisoner is stripped of his shirt and tied hand and foot to a post, then whipped with a leather scourge that has seven or nine or a dozen “tails,” whose ends are knotted or studded with metal. The first lashes raise horrible welts, and the man will scream ferociously. Subsequent lashes cut through his skin until, slice by slice, his back becomes raw flesh, blood pools at his feet, and his voice fails him. (Thus may have arisen the saying “Cat got your tongue?”) If his torture continues, his back will look as if it has been through a meat grinder. If he is lucky, he will pass out.
In Egypt, beatings, falanga, suspension in the air, and whippings enjoy wide currency. The other above tortures have all been used in recent years, some in Egypt, some in countries not far away. The cat-o’-nine-tails, which may have been named for the cat hide that ancient Egyptians used for the tails, was an official tool of the Egyptian state unti
l the twenty-first century, when it was banned because of international censure. The ban is nominal. All such bans are nominal. The prisoner in an Egyptian cell, waking or sleeping, has much to occupy his mind.
THAT A PERSON might say anything under coercion has seldom kept a nation from thinking he might say something worthwhile. In some city-states of ancient Greece, trial judges were permitted to order testimony tortured out of slaves when evidence of a crime was lacking. Aristotle approved. Although he acknowledged that “people under the duress of torture tell lies quite as often as they tell the truth—sometimes persistently refusing to tell the truth, sometimes recklessly making a false charge in order to be let off sooner,” he appears to have thought that only free Greeks could be so wily. Slaves and foreigners were simpler, and under torture they would usually tell the truth. The idea that it is bad to torture your own kind but acceptable to torture your lessers is one of the most enduring principles in the history of torture.
The Romans at first differed from the Greeks in that they tortured only as an extra punishment for those condemned to death. Later, however, the Romans adopted the Hellenic practice of torturing slaves for evidence. They initially restricted judicial torture, as the practice was called, to criminal (as opposed to civil) trials. The tortures included flogging, beating with rods, burning with hot irons, piercing with hooks, confining in small boxes, and racking—that is, stretching the limbs of a victim, who lay on a rack, bit by bit until ligaments snapped, bones dislodged, and muscles tore. (The rack has a false reputation as being of medieval origin; it was probably the most common of Rome’s tortures.) Under these tortures, slaves testified to all kinds of things, some of which were true, which so pleased the Romans that they eventually permitted the torture of free men and women, although only in trials for very great crimes like treason. Freemen, it turned out, blurted out testimony under torture as eagerly as slaves, which also pleased the Romans, who then reasoned that if someone might be tortured for evidence on the greatest of crimes, why not for evidence on merely great ones? So judicial torture was expanded to these crimes. Later it was expanded to somewhat lesser crimes, then to still lesser ones, so that in time there were a large number of “torturable” offenses.
Torture grew in other ways too. Where at first only witnesses who refused to testify were tortured, now even a witness who testified willingly could be tortured if her testimony seemed suspicious. The means of torture multiplied, and not just for witnesses. Convicts were now mutilated, crucified, or, famously, torn and gutted by wild animals before spectators. Here was another durable theme of torture: once introduced, it was hard to contain. The class of people who required torture, and the ways in which they ought to be tortured, were wont to multiply.
Not all of the ancients tortured. Babylonians, Hebrews, Hindus, many sub-Saharan Africans, Celts, Gauls, and Germans resolved nettlesome questions of proof through ordeals. In an ordeal, a defendant would be given a physical challenge, and her success or failure in overcoming it revealed an Almighty opinion of her guilt or innocence. A mild ordeal might be lifting a heavy weight or eating a potentially poisonous fruit. A more arduous one might require walking across fired ploughshares, plucking a stone from a boiling cauldron, or being thrown into a swift current with a millstone about the neck. Some ordeals were indistinguishable from torture, but generally they were more humane: while torture was prolonged, an ordeal usually was not; while several witnesses might be tortured for a single case, trial by ordeal needed no witnesses—only the accused was tormented. For reasons not entirely clear, most societies that used ordeals seem to have used them only in the way the Greeks and Romans first used judicial torture—that is, only in cases of great crimes where evidence was short or conflicting. Torture was expansive, infectious. Ordeals were not.
Societies that torture have always had reformers who believe the practice is inhumane and ineffective either at extracting more fact than fiction or at extracting fact that can be distinguished from fiction. In the Middle Ages, reformers in Europe came to see ordeals as an alternative to torture, and in 866 Pope Nicholas I banned judicial torture and replaced it with ordeals in those parts of Christendom under his influence. He could do so in part because the lawyers, judges, and legal scholars of western Europe, whose job it had been to administer the torture apparatus, were only too happy to let God decide difficult evidentiary questions. For the next three and a half centuries, God did so. But during these centuries the idea arose that ordeals might not be in keeping with Christ’s teachings either. So in 1215 the Church banned trial by ordeal, only this time it offered no replacement. In absentia dei, Europe’s jurists had to find their own way to evaluate vital questions of evidence, and, what was more, they had to convince people that they, the jurists—mere mortals—could make decisions of life and death that for centuries had been the province of God. Their predicament was no less potentially revolutionary than that of later democrats who sought to replace divinely ordained kings with elected ministers. (The democrats legitimated their decision by giving the vote to the people, or to a narrow subset of the people, but medieval judges did not think to do so. Trial by vote, which is to say trial by jury, would have to wait several centuries.)
In northern Italy jurists resolved the dilemma by brushing aside Nicholas’s ban of 866 and reviving the judicial torture of old Rome. Torture, they decided, would bring forth confessions and other compelling testimony, which meant judges would not have to make (as it were) judgment calls about guilt and innocence that God had once made. Like their Roman ancestors, the medieval Italians limited torture to the basest of defendants, the vilest of crimes, and the toughest of evidentiary questions. As a further safeguard, they devised complicated rules about when torture could be used. A judge might be required, for example, to have “half proof” of a crime before he could order someone tortured: an eyewitness to the crime might constitute one-quarter proof; a murder weapon found on the defendant might be another quarter; separately the proofs gave no cause for torture, but together they did. There were endless permutations. The Italians originally forbade the torture of the very old, the very frail, the very young, the pregnant, and witnesses (as opposed to defendants). Nor was torture permitted on red-letter days—Sundays and holy days, which were written in red on calendars. To ensure that only true confessions were tortured out of people, a confessor might be required to repeat his statement in court twenty-four hours after confessing. The idea was that if he had lied just to end the torture, he would recant on reflection. Judges, however, often sent a recanter back to the torture chamber on the theory that if he had lied under torture, he might be lying again in court and only further torture could determine which version of his story was true. It was the kind of logical quagmire that proponents of torture tended to get themselves into, having suspended logic to justify torture in the first place.
The Italian system of torture, which became known as Roman law, eventually spread south to Sicily, north to Scandinavia, west to Spain, and east to Germany. The tortures that spread with it tended to be ones that did not kill accidentally and that could be adjusted quickly in response to a victim’s answers. A favorite of Italian torturers was the strappado, in which the accused was suspended by ropes in five stages, or degrees, of escalating pain. Hence our phrase for harsh questioning, “the third degree.” Thumbscrews and legscrews—hence “to put the screws to”—and the rack were popular elsewhere. Typically governments did not specify what kinds of tortures the torturers should use. Lawmakers thought, as one French bureaucrat was told in 1670 when he tried to standardize which tortures ought to be used across the country, that “the description that would be necessary would be indecent in an ordinance.” The belief remains today.
The torturers of the Middle Ages and Renaissance eventually found what the Romans had found: try though they would to restrict torture, it slipped its fetters. If it was alright to torture in the case of a heinous crime, why not in the case of less heinous ones? If a serf could be tortur
ed, why not a landholder? If a defendant, why not a witness? If for trial, why not for punishment? As before, the class of torturables and the kinds of tortures expanded, and when Europeans settled around the world, they took their tortures with them. (Much of the world, of course, knew torture before Europeans arrived.) Thus in colonial America, Connecticut Quakers branded heretics with the letter H, and Virginians pierced the tongues of blasphemers with fired bodkins. Several of the eventual United States flogged criminals even into the twentieth century. Delaware, seized by a fit of reform in 1941, restricted the flogging of thieves to those who had stolen more than twenty-five dollars. In the 1970s, seized again, Dealware abolished the whipping post altogether.
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, several forces conspired to make torture less acceptable in Europe. One was the Enlightenment, which elevated the idea that all men had inherent rights, including the right to be free from cruelty. Another was a growing discomfort among nobles, who had not minded the torture of their inferiors but who began to see in torture a great harm to the nation when it came to be applied to their own caste. Still another was a decline in the number of people being condemned to death or maiming, which made it less essential to convict defendants with absolute certainty, which in turn made it less essential to torture evidence from them or witnesses. (Sentences of death and maiming tapered off largely because states started using condemned men to row their galleys and the condemned of both sexes to work their workhouses.) In this newly humane air, old arguments about the unreliability of tortured testimony drew a heartier breath, and great abolition movements arose. In 1754, Prussia’s Frederick the Great became the first sovereign to outlaw torture in all his lands, and most of the rest of Europe followed over the next several decades. Two Swiss cantons held out until 1851. In the West, torture as a matter of policy was dead. It was not forgotten, however. When the civilized world thought it useful, it would reappear.
A Kidnapping in Milan: The CIA on Trial Page 13
