I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing limited to 4 hours?
—Donald Rumsfeld, U.S. secretary of defense, comment
on memorandum authorizing stress positions
for Guantánamo internees, April 20031
In this chapter, I follow one major component of “stress and duress” techniques through the late twentieth century. Positional tortures require prisoners to assume normal human positions, but for abnormal periods of time. These positions include standing, sitting, kneeling, squatting, bowing, and lying. Some prisoners hold these positions voluntarily, fearing the consequences of disobedience. Others are bound in place. These tortures resemble restraint tortures, but restraint tortures differ in that the positions in which one is tied are not normal ones for human beings (suspension, for example).
Humans are not designed to stand utterly immobile, and even short periods of forced standing can be painful. Consider, for example, this report from a prisoner of the Gestapo in Hamburg in 1933–34. “Put the tips of your toes and the tip of your nose against the wall with your hands shackled behind your back, and stand straight. After you stand so for an hour your eyes bulge out of their caves and you feel as if huge rocks are pressing in on you from both sides.”2 Or this report from a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion in the 1920s describing what happens to men who have one foot fixed permanently to the ground and are forced to stand. “Now, that doesn’t sound very terrible, does it? Yet, after half-an-hour of it, I have heard men screaming and raving.”3 Secretary Rumsfeld is fortunate he is not obliged to stand immobile. Swiftly, moving becomes painful, and soon the ankles and feet swell to twice their size, and large blisters appear within twenty-four hours. This, probably combined with dehydration, causes the kidneys to fail.4
In this chapter, I note the agents, locations, and date, to the extent possible, of various positional tortures. Unfortunately, positional tortures are hard to map. They rarely involve specific technology (like electricity) or material (like water). Prisoners’ accounts do not always highlight them. There may well be more cases than mentioned here. My goal is simply to map known trends and evaluate claims made about how positional tortures spread.
As I argued in part III, the dominant style in stealth torture today is French modern, that is, the combination of electrotorture and water torture, more recently supplemented with falaka, clean whipping, gas masks, and plastic bags. Few states today have favored “stress and duress” techniques over the dominant style. Those that have were either democratic states or states under international scrutiny, or both.
Positional torture continued among countries that practiced positional torture during and after World War II. Interrogators practiced positional tortures either at the margins of colonial systems (France, the United Kingdom) or as a domestic police practice (Japan, the Soviet Union, East Germany). Some countries resumed positional torture after a hiatus of two decades (Brazil, Spain) or more (the United States).
German and Japanese officers continued positional tortures in concentration camps until the war was lost and the camps disbanded. Prisoners in the United States, whether POWs or civilians, did not report positional tortures; if the practice existed, it was rare. In Morocco, the Free French practiced the tombeau “virtually under the shadow of the American flag,” according to an American investigator in February 1943.5
The French camps imprisoned remnants of the old Foreign Legion and thousands of central European Jews and Spanish Republicans. The French used them as laborers to build a trans-Saharan railroad. A Jewish concentration camp survivor and Foreign Legion veteran described the model punishment as “the ‘tomb,’ which consisted in placing the victim in a kind of tomb dug by himself.” Prisoners were “forced to stay in a horizontal position” for several days, guarded by an armed Moroccan or Senegalese sentry.6 In 1942, an American Office of Strategic Services officer investigating one French camp reported that there were “two rows of such tombs, one meter apart.”7
In 1943, French authorities prohibited the tombeau in labor camps (once again, for it had been abolished before the war as well).8 The tombeau nevertheless persisted into the 1950s. Between 1952 and 1953, protests were lodged at the United Nations, and the practice was once again abolished.9 At least one report from 1959 suggests that it persisted well into the Algerian war.10
French soldiers also adopted forced standing. In the first reported case in 1956, a prisoner describes how French soldiers made her stand for twelve hours with a hood over her head. Over the next four years, prisoners report being forced to kneel holding a chair, squat for hours inside a box, or stand for up to twenty-four hours, sometimes on one leg, or with one’s hands in the air.11
Soviet interrogators used forced standing on Axis POWs throughout the war. “Physical torture to persuade German prisoners to join was not standard practice, but beatings, forced standing in the snow or cold, implied threat or execution were not that uncommon either.”12 After the war, interrogators used the Stalinist Conveyor system (positional tortures and sweating techniques) well into the 1950s.
The British had practiced forced standing as a military field punishment since 1907. Regulations for field punishments in 1949 indicate that British officers continued fixed object punishment after World War II. These regulations specify that a prisoner could be held in fetters or handcuffs and secured to an object “to prevent his escape.” The duration could not exceed three months or, in the case of a commanding officer, twenty-eight days. Irons were recommended, but straps and ropes were permitted. Above all, “Every portion of a field punishment shall be inflicted in such a manner as is calculated not to cause injury or to leave any permanent mark on the offender.”13
The technique, however, was not limited to British servicemen. Prisoners in Mandatory Palestine also reported being subjected to it in the 1930s. Between July 1940 and September 1948, British interrogators used forced standing as part of a brutal regimen to coerce German POWs to make statements about war crimes. Over thirty-five hundred German POWs went through a clandestine military prison in London, and one thousand made statements, which in some cases was the only evidence against them.
Recently revealed documents outline the techniques commonly used at the London office of the Combined Services Detailed Interrogation Centre, otherwise known as the “London Cage.”14 Prisoners were forced to stand at attention for up to twenty-six hours, forced to kneel as they were beaten about the head, deprived of sleep and food, exposed to extremes of heat and cold including cold-water showers, subjected to mock executions, and threatened with unnecessary operations and electrical devices.
In 1946, Capt. Fritz Knoechlein, as SS officer, submitted a written complaint stating that as he refused to confess, he was stripped of most clothes (in October), deprived of sleep for four days, starved, forced to perform rigorous exercises until he collapsed, forced to march in a tight circle for four hours, doused with cold water, beaten with a cudgel, forced to stand beside a large gas stove with all its rings lit, then confined in a shower that sprayed extremely cold water from the sides, as well as above, and then forced to run in circles while carrying heavy logs. Since some of these tortures followed his complaint, he heeded the guards’ advice not to complain again. One may be skeptical of Knoechlein’s complaints, as he was sentenced to death at the time, but his accounts do not differ substantively from those of other prisoners.
It is difficult to determine whether the British government endorsed these procedures. Lt. Col. Alexander Scotland supervised the Cage. Scotland had received an Order of the British Empire for his interrogation of German prisoners in World War I, and MI19, the department of the War Office responsible for gathering information from POWs, assigned Scotland to run the Cage. Scotland refused Red Cross inspections, arguing that his prisoners were either civilians or criminals within the armed forces, and so not protected by the Geneva Convention. An MI5 investigation concluded otherwise, noting that Scotland had repeatedly violated the Geneva Convention when he subjected prisoners to, among other things, forced standing. Scotland was never charged, and information pointing to war crimes in his memoirs was suppressed. Scotland may not have had the clear approval of MI19, but it is certain his superiors knew of the allegations of torture and then quietly overlooked events at the Cage.
In 1956, during the Cyprus emergency, British police units received copies of the 1949 regulations on fixed object punishment.15 About the same time, there were accusations of similar procedures being applied to civilian prisoners. In January 1956, for example, an Athens newspaper charged that British police forced EOKA (Ethniki Organosis Kyprion Agoniston, or National Organization of Cypriot Fighters) prisoners in Cyprus “to stand on nails or on ice.”16 Forced standing then appeared in 1965 in Aden, where British troops made prisoners stand naked throughout interrogations. Prisoners also reported guards “forcing them to sit on poles ‘directed towards’ their anus.”17 But a military report of the Aden scandal did not even consider forced standing as abuse, focusing entirely on other allegations.18
What was a custom of the service (as the British expression goes) in the Middle East, though, was torture to the British in Korea. During the Korean War, British POWs had no difficulty describing their treatment as torture. After the war, the Joint Services Intelligence School at Maresfield began subjecting soldiers, particularly pilots, to known Soviet techniques, training them to resist the effects of these procedures.19 This training is now known as “R21 techniques” or “resistance to interrogation.”20 Army Intelligence in turn trained Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) interrogators in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s, though it did not supervise actual interrogations.21 The RUC used several positional tortures on numerous prisoners in Northern Ireland throughout the 1970s. These included forced sitting, forced squatting, and standing with hands raised.22 In the late 1970s, RUC guards enforced the “imaginary chair” in which the prisoner has “to squat with his back to the wall for an hour” as if he was sitting in a chair.23
In 1946, a senior Japanese police official explained that humane treatment of suspects was among “luxuries which we [Japanese] cannot afford,” and that sometimes police officials had to solve crimes “by methods that perhaps are not considered humane.”24 In 1947, an American intelligence researcher reported, “The Japanese police are still using third degree methods to extort confessions from people whom they believe guilty.”25
What these methods were was unclear until an important study by the Japanese Federation of Bar Associations in the mid-1980s of one hundred cases, some going back to the early 1970s. This, and subsequent studies, revealed that Japanese police used a painful, but stealthy regimen of positional tortures, exhaustion exercises, and restraints for purposes of interrogation and intimidation. Prisoners reported forced immobility in several positions, including standing, sitting, squatting on the heels, but most commonly the customary kneeling position, or seiza.26 Prison rules at Fuchu prison specified, “Do not on your own accord lie down in the cell. Moreover, do not lean against or sit on the bedding.”27
Spanish Republicans used forced standing in the late 1930s, but accounts do not mention this practice under the Franco regime in the 1950s. In 1968, prisoners reported being forced to stand or kneel, and the practice becomes common the 1970s.28 In the standing position, prisoners held their arms out horizontally, supporting heavy objects. In the kneeling position, prisoners rested on fine gravel stones or steel ball bearings or they were forced to hold heavy objects like telephone books.29 Prisoners have continued to report forced immobility positions until the present, including standing (sometimes on tiptoes or with arms raised), prolonged standing with bent knees, and kneeling on a bar.30
In 1942, American and British advisers instructed Brazilian police in forced standing, but other incidents are not reported until 1966. After this date, prisoners report being made to stand for hours before bright lights (sabão em pó).31 By 1970, guards made prisoners stand on tiptoe with four telephone books in each hand (nicknamed “Christ the Redeemer”).32 They also made prisoners stand on top of cans with bare feet, in which position they would beat them and burn them with cigarettes. They attached electric wires to prisoners. They applied electroshock if victims began to collapse in exhaustion. The jolts of electricity made the hooded victims’ feet stick to the cans, contracted their muscles, and so forced them to stand up straight. “To all this the authorities gave the name of Viet Nam.”33
When American interrogators turned to torture in the late twentieth century, their preferred style was French modern. American positional torture first reappeared domestically in the context of prisons, particularly prisons that primarily held non-American detainees for immigration violations. Edward Calejo, a prison guard in Miami’s Krome Detention Center, described how he treated detainees in the early 1990s. “I mean, we make guys stand in line—they just stand there, just to stand there. ‘Don’t move,’ you know. And we’d make them stand there all day long.”34 In addition to forced standing, Calejo described a regimen at Krome that included slapping, beating, pointless exercises, and humiliation.35 In 1998, inmates at Florida’s Jackson County Jail described a large concrete slab to which individuals were tied in a crucifix position. The slab had iron rings in the corners and leather straps for the arms and legs. As one prisoner stated, “Concrete. Cold, cold, cold. And they’ll cut the AC up high, high, high, and you’ll be butt-naked. . . . You’re on your belly. . . . Andwhen time to eat, they loose one hand. So you eat, and they strap you back. It’s torture, man.”36 Other prisoners describe how guards shocked them with stun guns and electric shields while they were in this position.37
In the mid-1990s, American prisons adopted restraint chairs. These chairs tilt backward like lounge chairs, but have restraints for the wrists and ankles. “Shackle boards” or “restraint beds” also use four point restraints, but they are used mainly in Virginia prisons.38 Prisoners report being strapped into restraint chairs as punishment or to incapacitate them while being tortured in some other manner. In August 1999, a judge ruled in a Tennessee case that confessions extracted while suspects are strapped in restraint chairs are invalid. In November 1999, a judge in Ventura County, California, issued a preliminary injunction banning their use in the county jail after a lawsuit alleged widespread abuse.39
In military interrogation, positional torture first occurs in Afghanistan. In December 2002, prisoners at Bagram airbase reported that interrogators kept them “standing or kneeling for hours.”40 Subsequent reports documented forced lying (Afghanistan), forced sitting, sometimes using padded restraint chairs (Guantánamo, Cuba), and forced standing or kneeling (Iraq).41
Positional torture in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq involved the greatest variations.42 It included forcing prisoners to hold boxes and balance themselves on MRE (Meals Ready to Eat) boxes with arms extended. One military policeman (MP) attached wires to the fingers of hooded prisoners, warning them that they would receive electroshock if they ceased to stand. Prisoners were also handcuffed to rails, bunks, or doors of their cell and forced to stand or lie for long periods.
Agents in these cases were MPs, allegedly directed by military intelligence or Special Forces units. In addition, two MPs “were put in charge because they were civilian prison guards and had knowledge of how things were supposed to run.” Staff Sergeant Frederick, the group leader, had worked six years for the Virginia Department of Corrections.43
In the 1950s, Soviet advisers taught positional tortures to interrogators in other Communist states. If ideology shapes the distribution and transmission of torture techniques (the ideology hypothesis), one would expect to see great continuity in tortures in Communist states, with a pronounced preference for positional tortures. After all, interrogators shared not only ideological beliefs, but also common training from the leading Communist state. But this is not what occurred. Almost everywhere in the Communist world, positional tortures started disappearing by the 1960s. By the 1980s, if the practice of positional torture existed at all, it was a minor part of a far more horrific regimen. Here again, the evidence does not support the ideology hypothesis and suggests other factors were at work.
To be specific, there is no question that the Stalinist Conveyor system appeared in many Communist states following World War II. In the 1950s prisoners reported positional torture in Hungary (forced standing and sitting), East Germany (sitting), Bulgaria (standing), and Romania (standing on one foot, forced lying).44 Such practices probably occurred elsewhere in Eastern Europe in this period.
Chinese interrogators forced prisoners to stand, wrapping gauze around the feet that caused increasing pain as the feet swelled from prolonged standing.45 During the Cultural Revolution, prisoners were forced to bow forward with arms extended for prolonged periods, a painful groveling posture known as the “airplane.”46 Later prisoners report various coerced postures including standing, kneeling, lying on a shackle board (di lao, “tiger bed”), or sitting (sometimes on a low stool), standing on one foot, leaning against walls, or strapped to the floor with arms outstretched.47
In North Korea, American and British POWs reported forced standing holding a rock over one’s head, standing at attention for hours in freezing weather, or standing in water-soaked holes.48
The North Vietnamese had adopted Soviet confessional techniques in the late 1940s, but prisoners do not report forced standing until 1965. In this year, American POWs report forced kneeling with hands in the air or, less frequently, sitting or standing.49 Guards would sometimes place objects (pebbles or sticks) under the knees. One POW observed, “kneeling torture” was similar to “driving a long nail under the kneecap.” The knees swelled to the size of a large grapefruit. “The sensitive human knee when in contact with rough, bare concrete for a long period of time, generates great pain. . . . If you have any doubts about this, try kneeling on a broomstick with your hands in the air for 15 or 20 minutes.”50 After the war, guards in prison camps occasionally applied forced standing.51
In the late 1970s, Cambodian torturers took a different approach. Before the revolution, Cambodians greeted each other by pressing palms together (sompeah). When recognizing those of higher status (royalty, Buddhist monks, or an image of the Buddha), Cambodians raised the joined palms above the head and, sometimes, prostrated themselves (thvay bongkum, or paying homage). At Tuol Sleng interrogation center, this honorary gesture was rendered into a positional torture dubbed “paying homage to the wall,” “to the chair,” “to the table,” or “to the image of dogs” or sometimes called sompeah. Holding this position for long periods was “enough in most cases to induce a full confession.”52
In the Middle East, Syrian and Iraqi interrogators forced prisoners to stand on one leg for prolonged periods, sometimes with their hands in the air.53 In Soviet-occupied Afghanistan, torturers forced prisoners to stand for long periods in snow or water.54
The preceding evidence may suggest that Communist states fully embraced the Stalinist style of positional tortures and sweating techniques, and so are evidence in favor of the ideology hypothesis. But this spread of positional tortures needs to be kept in perspective. In Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Albania, flogging and beating were far more common than positional tortures.55 Afghani, Syrian, and Iraqi torturers beat, whipped, and shocked prisoners; burned and boiled their flesh; mutilated them with knives; crushed bones in presses; roasted victims on spits; or impaled prisoners in the anus with skewers.56 Soviet allies in Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, Angola, Mozambique) did not use positional tortures at all, choosing far more sanguinary techniques.57
The North Vietnamese preferred excruciating rope tortures that popped out the shoulder joints and “hell cuffs” that tightened until they cut to the bone, practices that continued after the war, while Cubans beat and disfigured prisoners and Cuban advisers in Vietnam used scarring flogging and water torture on American POWs.58 In Cambodia, torture was a prelude to genocide. Tuol Sleng torturers applied beatings, full suspension, electrotorture, water torture, and mutilation with knives and sharp-edged presses.59
Between 1950 and 1980, Chinese torturers used rope tortures, fetters, tightening handcuffs, finger bandaging, and coffinlike wooden cupboards for sweatboxes.60 By the 1980s, the Chinese turned to electrotorture, full suspension, standing handcuffs, reverse standing handcuffs, and restraint tortures.61
Forced standing and sleep deprivation did continue in the Soviet military as a routine punishment, but again this practice needs to be kept in perspective. It is hard to underestimate the level of brutality in Soviet army training. In 1990, Soviet papers reported that fifteen thousand soldiers died during the first five years of perestroika, four thousand in 1989 alone. These figures did not include those who died in combat in Afghanistan and elsewhere.62
All this is what one would expect under the monitoring hypothesis. Where there is no public monitoring and accountability, why bother being stealthy? However, during détente and perestroika, some countries became more mindful of publicity in specific cases. In the 1960s, Soviet authorities entirely abandoned Stalinist positional tortures and sweating for incarcerating dissidents in psychiatric institutions, a transition I discuss in a subsequent chapter. Romania, Cuba, and China adopted this practice as well. Torture was now disguised as medical treatment. Likewise, where avoiding monitoring mattered, Soviet army officers were fully capable of combining methods that left few traces.63
In some East European countries, torture became infrequent. For example, in its first annual audit of torture worldwide in 1973, Amnesty International reported that it had not received reports of torture in the past ten years from Hungary, Poland, or Czechoslovakia.64 In its 1986 audit, Amnesty International reported forced standing only in Yugoslavia.65
In the 1990s, positional torture was still rare in Eastern Europe. In Albania, prisoners report fixed object restraints.66 In Slovakia, prisoners report being forced to stand (sometimes with arms outstretched, knees bent, or on tiptoe) or to kneel on a chair.67 Forced standing is occasionally reported in Yugoslavia and in provincial cities in Russia.68
The survey of Communist states suggests that, although one may receive one’s techniques from a common source (the universal distributor hypothesis), this training rapidly decays, especially in the absence of monitoring. And although a certain technique might be strongly associated with a common ideology (the ideology hypothesis), shared beliefs are insufficient to keep continuity in techniques. Monitoring seems to do a better job in explaining why torturers select scarring or clean tortures. And there is further evidence in favor of the monitoring hypothesis when one looks at the distribution of positional torture in the non-Communist world.
In this section, I cover the expanding scope (not magnitude) of positional tortures as the techniques appear in one state after another. The states covered in this section do not have common ideologies, so it is not likely that this preference for positional torture is driven by ideological considerations. I will consider at the end of this chapter whether a universal distributor hypothesis is confirmed by the evidence. Here, I simply make the historical claim that while positional torture was disappearing in Communist countries, positional torture was spreading rapidly to authoritarian and democratic states elsewhere, often in states where there was a known concern for leaving few marks. I list the known instances in chronological order, based on the date of the first report of positional torture.
Venezuela. Around 1953, Venezuela police adopted forced standing facing the wall, dubbing it the “Thirty-eighth Parallel.”69 Interrogators also forced prisoners to stand with arms extended or before bright lights for days, a torture called the “Hot Chapel” (capilla ardiente).70 In 1998, a survey of 135 prisoners tortured in the previous three years reported positional tortures in ten cases, showing policemen had not forgotten this technique.71
In 1953, the most notorious positional torture was the Ring (el ring), which was used on “hundreds of prisoners,”72 Prisoners mounted a truck or automobile wheel rim turned flat on its side. Barefooted, they balanced themselves on the rims, handcuffed behind the back. “At first, the position is just uncomfortable, but after some hours have passed the edge of the rim hurt the bottoms of the feet to the point of producing bloody wounds. Later the pain is unbearable. . . . The feet swell up to the ankles.”73
Portugal. In 1953, Humberto Lopes, a Communist leader, reported that PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, forced him to stand for hours. Subsequently, two other prisoners, leaders in the Angolan and Portuguese Communist parties, made similar allegations. By the early 1960s, “statue torture” (estatua) and sleep deprivation were PIDE’s main torture techniques.74 For six days, says one prisoner, “I suffered the statue . . . on falling asleep, I would be woken at once or within a few minutes by having pins stuck in me or by shaking, or by sounds of knocking or tapping. In the end the slightest noise would waken me. I have since suffered from auditive hallucinations.”75
As allegations of torture mounted, the Portuguese government invited Lord Russell to investigate. Lord Russell was a respected journalist who had covered Nazi torture. He assumed incorrectly that statue torture had to be performed in a stehzelle, a standing box like those the Nazis used. When he could not find one in PIDE prisons, he concluded the prisoners were lying.76 Russell was a skilled observer, but unfamiliar with clean tortures like the Spot. His inexperience became embarrassingly obvious by the 1970s.
Portuguese prisoners knew why PIDE preferred forced standing. “I should explain that, as I was told by the PIDE agents, this [the statue] does not nowadays mean being required to stand all the time and being beaten when you sit or fall down, because that would leave marks.”77 In 1970s, in Mozambique, PIDE’s main positional torture was prolonged kneeling on a broom handle with one’s hands raised, dubbed the torture of the rod (tortura da vara).78
South Africa. South African police adopted positional tortures in the early 1960s. A 1989 study of 175 torture victims indicated that forced standing occurred in 50 percent of all cases. About 34 percent of the prisoners report being forced to crouch, stand on their toes with arms up stretched, do the imaginary chair, or hold heavy objects over their heads.79 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which uses the broader category of posture tortures (positional and restraint tortures) records that posture tortures occurred in a little less that one-third of three hundred cases between 1960 and 1973, increased to almost twofifths of almost five hundred cases between 1974 and 1984, and then declined to about one-fifth of about eleven hundred cases in the final years of apartheid.80
South African police developed several different posture tortures.81 The earliest reported case (1961) involved kneeling and holding a chair over one’s head while handcuffed.82 In 1963, there was the imaginary chair: a prisoner had to crouch as if he was sitting in “a government chair, so I must not break it.”83 In 1964, a prisoner reported the Spot. Interrogators put a sheet of paper on the floor and made the prisoner stand on it for two days.84 Interrogators also made prisoners stand on one leg.85 Sometimes guards put pebbles or sand in the shoes.
The most common reports concerned “brick torture.” “They turn two bricks towards each other like an inverted V—and you have to stand on that narrow edge while you are being interrogated, and you’ve got to balance yourself on your arches, which are killing you.”86 Sometimes a prisoner also held a brick over his head in this position. Another method, reported a police captain, “is where a person stands on a brick balancing on his heels or on his toes for hours.”87
Greece. In 1967, a prisoner in Greece reported forced standing at the Heraclion Gendarmerie, a practice that became more common in the 1970s.88 “They made me stand with one arm in the air, like the Statue of Liberty and I kept falling down.”89 Prisoners described standing at attention facing the wall or standing in the Spot.90
South Vietnam. In the late 1960s, prisoners reported interrogators making them stand for hours before bright lights.91 Prisoners did not report Americans using positional torture.
South Korea. Starting in the late 1960s, prisoners reported forced standing and sitting.92
Uruguay. Forced standing (the plantón) begins as early as 1971. An army torturer, Lieutenant Cooper, indicated the plantón was a preferred method.93 Just how common is revealed in Ole Rasmussen’s survey of two hundred victims from eight countries, all tortured between 1970 and 1983. Most Uruguayans (89 percent) reported forced standing, as did the majority of victims from Spain and Northern Ireland (60 percent and 61 percent respectively). In Greece, Chile, Argentina, and Iraq, only 10–20 percent of prisoners reported forced standing.94
Nicaragua. In 1973, a respected journalist reported he was forced to “squat for periods of many hours until he collapsed.”95
Israel. In 1974, a Palestinian prisoner reported being forced to stand with his hands in the air.96 The preferred GSS method in this period, however, remained French modern. After 1987, torture changed dramatically.97 The GSS abandoned electricity for “tying up” techniques, al-Shabeh.
The shabeh consists of restraint tortures, positional tortures, exhaustion exercises, and clean beating, sometimes inflicted according to a specified schedule. It includes prolonged forced squatting (the qambaz, or Frog), forced sitting, and forced standing. It also includes stehzelle, narrow cells in which detainees must stand handcuffed or with their hands tied behind or above their head. Khazayen, or “coffin cells,” can be as small as fifty by seventy centimeters.98 In 1991, lawyers for a detainee received his medical record, including a form specifying the detainee’s fitness for interrogation, which stated that the detainee “could be bound, hooded, and made to stand for long periods.”99
In 1999, the High Court of Justice forbade certain elements of the shabeh. Subsequently, human rights groups have documented numerous cases where GSS officers applied not only the qambaz (now prohibited) and forced-sitting shabeh, but also prolonged forced standing with arms raised or standing with knees bent or on one leg, all performed without coffin cells.100
The Philippines. In 1975, prisoners reported being subjected to “lying on air” torture, also called the “San Juanico Bridge.” This consisted of making prisoners lie with feet on one bed and head another bed.101 In the 1980s, investigators describe “forced lying on blocks of ice.”102
Information about other cases is somewhat more limited. Forced standing was routine in Argentina after 1976, but again the preferred techniques were French modern.103 Though not reported in the initial reports after Pinochet’s coup, forced standing became routine in Chile by the mid-1970s.104 Iranian prisoners report forced squatting on an invisible chair (“the chair”).105
In the 1980s, torturers in Paraguay required prisoners to sit in a fetus position (feto) for hours.106 Bolivian torturers made prisoners lie parallel to the floor supported only by the head and tips of the toes (the Pig, el chancho).107 In 1986, a monitoring group in El Salvador reported that 387 out of 433 prisoners interviewed (89 percent) reported forced standing and sleep deprivation. Some also reported the chancho.108 Colombian torturers employed forced standing (plantones) in the 1980s. In 2003, Colombian prisoners reported being forced to bend forward with the head touching the ground and the hands tied behind the back (also called el chancho).109 Detainees in Saudi Arabia also reported prolonged forced standing in the mid-1980s.110
In the 1990s, torturers in Burundi forced prisoners to “kneel for long periods on sharp bottle tops or pebbles.”111 In Sudan in the 1990s, prisoners reported being “beaten, whipped, and forced to stand for long periods.”112 In 1994, detainees in Indian Kashmir reported “forced standing or lying for hours in the snow, completely or partially naked.”113 In Pakistan, some prisoners detained in the 1990s reported enforced standing.114 In Burma/Myanmar, a prisoner detained in the late 1990s reported being “forced to stand on tiptoe for hours on end, knees bent, and buzz like an aero plane.” Later, he was forced to kneel on sharp stones.115 In Tunisia, prison punishment included being “forced to remain all night facing the wall, standing in the hall near the guards, and sometimes completely naked.”116
In 1999, Mexican prisoners reported prolonged standing and squatting.117 In 1999, the Austrian Ministry of Justice prohibited restraint beds in prisons (also known as “cage beds,” or gitterbetten). Prison officials claimed they had inherited them from a mental hospital in 1994 and denied that they used them. In 2001, a prisoner died after being tied to a bed using four-point restraints.118 In 2002, prisoners in Cambodia were “forced to stand in the sun for long periods, or to stand on their own hands, or balance on one foot.”119 Lastly, there are the reports from American-occupied Iraq. For example, members of the Eighty-second Airborne forced detainees “to hold five-gallon water jugs with arms outstretched or do jumping jacks until they passed out.”120 In addition to American usage, Danish interrogators interrogated Iraqi prisoners allegedly using techniques including forced kneeling, exposure to extreme cold, “moderate physical pressure, loud music and standing for long periods of time.”121
In reviewing these cases, it is hard not to notice that the spread of positional tortures begins in the 1960s and accelerates in the last three decades of the century. This chronology coincides with the emergence of a global human rights monitoring regime, and so favors the universal monitoring hypothesis. In the next section, I consider whether one can explain this pattern more persuasively with reference to a universal distributor, and find this argument unpersuasive.
It is more difficult to get a handle on the preference of some states for positional tortures over other techniques. Clearly, some states preferred positional torture over electrotorture (notably Portugal (1950s), Britain (1970s), and Israel (1990s), while one knows from part I that many states trended in the opposite direction, favoring electrotorture and water torture over positional torture (France, Spain, South Africa, Latin America, and the United States).
It would be difficult to explain this preference by appealing to ideology, since it is difficult to find a shared ideology among these states. It would also be difficult to explain the preference for positional tortures with reference to efficiency. Positional tortures are labor-saving devices (the prisoner does the work), but they take time to have their effects. Torturers use them when they have plenty of time, mainly to intimidate prisoners or force a false confession. When they are short of time, torturers normally reach for devices like magnetos that cause immediate pain. This might explain why the Portuguese adopted positional tortures, since here the PIDE may just have wanted confessions.
But it fails to explain why the British or the Israeli interrogators turned to positional tortures. In both cases these states were confronting, by their own accounts, urgent civil emergencies where timeliness was critical. If one takes these states at their word, then one can only conclude that in these cases they reached for practices that they knew from their own histories or that had a fearsome reputation, and torturers persisted in their usage out of habit, as the craft apprenticeship hypothesis would suggest. Otherwise, one must conclude that, contrary to what these states alleged, the purpose of torture was to generate false confessions and torturers did not really operate under the urgency of a ticking time bomb.
In the twentieth century, positional torture was most common in southern Europe, East Asia, and Latin America. It was less frequently reported in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. In the Communist world, which did not worry about public monitoring, torturers chose mutilating techniques over positional torture, and the Stalinist tradition of positional torture tended to fade over time. Elsewhere in the world, interrogators combined clean torture techniques in various ways, and here positional torture took root. It did so unevenly, appearing more commonly in some states than in others.
The country with the longest history in positional torture was Britain. In the Middle East, the British practiced forced standing between 1900 and 1975, first as a field punishment (Egypt) and then on political prisoners (Mandatory Palestine, Cyprus, and Aden). There are no reports of forced standing in British colonies in Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. Forced standing seems to have been a customary regional practice, one that did not receive much thought until it received attention from religious organizations (Mandatory Palestine), newspapers (Cyprus), and human rights organizations (Aden).
British troops also practiced forced standing in the British Isles, first as a field punishment, then during World War II at the London Cage, then in “resistance to interrogation” programs, and lastly, in Northern Ireland. Here again, aside from public objections during World War I, information about these practices was suppressed or went unnoticed until the 1970s. Then, “Changing attitudes coupled with more intense scrutiny of all security forces methods [by the media] rendered unacceptable methods which had hitherto attracted no attention.”122
More generally, positional torture flourished at the margins of colonial systems (Britain, France) and in authoritarian states most proximate to European human rights monitors (Portugal, Spain, and Greece). It spread rapidly through Latin America after 1965, at about the same time that human rights monitoring become ubiquitous. Democratic states gave it a greater role in the same period (Spain, Israel, Japan, India, Colombia).
The history here supports the claim that what drives the spread of clean torture techniques is public monitoring (the monitoring hypothesis) and the chronology coincides with the emergence of an international human rights regime (the universal monitoring hypothesis). But the history also indicates some states played important roles in spreading positional tortures, and so there could be a single important universal distributor. Still, let me consider the possible universal distributors (the USSR, the UK, and the United States) and explain why I am not persuaded by this explanation.123
The most important universal distributor of positional tortures was the USSR. Certainly, Soviet interrogators played an important role in training interrogators elsewhere how to use Stalinist positional tortures and sweating techniques. Nevertheless, the most durable effect of Soviet intervention was probably indirect and inadvertent.
To be specific, direct Soviet training did not seem to last long, as allied interrogators gradually switched to other techniques. But the use of Stalinist techniques in the Korean War had an important effect in the non-Communist world, advertising the power of positional tortures (“brainwashing”). Forced standing appears in Venezuela and Portugal around 1953. Venezuelan torturers referenced the Korean War by calling forced standing the “Thirty-eighth Parallel.” The French practiced forced standing before World War II, but prisoners do not report it after the war until 1956. These events seem hardly coincidental.
After the Korean War, British and American forces adopted training procedures for soldiers who might be subjected to Soviet techniques.124 “Stress inoculation” programs, as they are now called, may have had the effect of making known techniques to soldiers who then brought that experience to bear in Northern Ireland, Afghanistan, and Iraq.
The Soviet example captures various ways torture can be transmitted. Sometimes torture is transmitted through training (China, Eastern Europe). Sometimes rumor is sufficient (Venezuela, France, Portugal). Some torturers apply the worst that was experienced by themselves or their mates to their prisoners (British and American positional torture; Israeli standing cells). In yet other cases, police reach for what is customary (Japan). All of this is much as the craft apprenticeship hypothesis would suggest.
British forces are also identified as universal distributors, carrying common interrogation techniques from Malaya (1948–60) to Kenya (1952–56) to Aden (1963–67) to Hong Kong (1967) to Northern Ireland (1971–74).125 This claim, however, greatly overstates the degree to which British counterinsurgency training was centralized and standardized.126 If British interrogation practices were standardized, one would expect standard techniques passed on in a developing trajectory from event to event. That is not what the record shows.
Prisoners at the London Cage (1940–48) were subjected primarily to forced standing and kneeling, beating, sleep deprivation, cold showers, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and exhaustion exercises. On the other hand, no torture is reported during the British counterinsurgency in Malaya (1948–60). Torture in Kenya (1952–56) was sanguinary and flogging normally; sleep deprivation and positional tortures are not reported.127 Cyprus (1956) involved beatings and public floggings, before interrogators turned to clean beating, forced standing, ice, and drugs. Interrogators in Hong Kong (1967) sweated suspects (sleep deprivation and relay interrogation). They did not use forced standing or beating. In Aden (1963–67), they did. RUC beating in Northern Ireland (1972–80) was part of a highly stealthy art, but British police practice at home did not show such sophistication.128 There was also much “RUC ‘freelancing’ ” with other “bizarre tortures,” some of it amateurish.129 And there were unique regional techniques, air conditioners in Aden and white noise generators in Northern Ireland.130 British agents in Kenya slipped hot eggs into rectums and vaginas, a technique that then appears in Cyprus.131 A British Special Branch interrogator in Cyprus claims to have come up with the “hot egg under the armpit” technique that still occasionally appears in the Mediterranean region, but this seems more likely to be an adaptation of the Kenyan approach.132 It does not appear in subsequent British colonial conflicts. Lastly, electrotorture appeared widely in Kenya but not in Aden and in only a few incidents in Cyprus and Northern Ireland.
There is no obvious trajectory here. Calling all this “torture” gives the impression of continuity while disguising intrastate variations in what techniques interrogators chose in different conflicts. In fact, the pattern of torture confirms what is generally known about British counterinsurgency.
While the French developed a clear counterinsurgency doctrine, no comparable “British doctrine” emerged until long after Britain’s counterinsurgency operations had ceased.133 Most counterinsurgency campaigns were organized on an ad hoc basis. When asked to explain their methods, officers described them as “common sense” or “making it up as we went along,” and could not cite precedents for their actions even when they existed. Interrogation practices, like other techniques, “were transmitted informally from one generation of soldiers and civil servants to the next.”134
Why were counterinsurgency operations so improvised? First, the army promoted officers based on their ability to handle conventional troops. Prowess in irregular warfare was not valued. In addition, “The very decentralization that had made the British army and colonial administration such a flexible machine may have inhibited the collection and transmission of experience.” Officers in Kenya “probably did not come into contact with district officers from Malaya or anywhere else in the empire.” Lastly, district officers were territorial, and competing regiments “may have had a similar unwillingness to share experience.”135
In 1942, American advisers trained Brazilian police in positional torture. And by the late twentieth century, many Latin American countries practiced positional torture (Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Bolivia, Paraguay).
However, American training in positional torture is one, but probably the least significant, of several sources. By the 1960s, Americans interrogators preferred electrotorture and water torture. American interrogators in Vietnam did not use positional torture. Similarly, the Chicago police department, when it tortured in the early 1970s, preferred French modern.
In fact, Latin American torturers could have learned positional tortures from several sources. Venezuelans copied the practice from Korean War reports in the 1950s. South Africa and Argentina exchanged torture experts in the mid-1970s.136 The Brazilians could have learned it from Portugal’s PIDE. And world media reported extensively on British positional torture in Northern Ireland.
The famous hooded man at Abu Ghraib was forced to balance on a box with the threat of electric torture if he collapsed. Staff Sergeant Frederick testified that military interrogators told him to stage a mock electrocution. He then instructed two other guards to attach wires to the fingers and toes of the hooded man.137 In fact, he was one of several prisoners subjected to this technique. Where did the MI men learn this technique?
In 2002, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld received and approved a memorandum that recommended positional tortures for interrogations.138 Perhaps Pentagon lawyers suggested forced standing because the European courts considered it simply ill-treatment in the case of the Irish hooded men. Or maybe military officers remembered it from stress inoculation training. Or maybe this was the CIA’s memory of the Korean War.
One day we will know more about the memos. The American practice of positional torture in Iraq does suggest at least one history, one that does not exist if one just studies memos, and one that does not point to Communist North Korea or Northern Ireland.
The torture of the hooded man at Abu Ghraib has three components: hooding, standing balanced on a box, and having wires attached. Few countries hooded prisoners for torture in the early twentieth century. The Gestapo practiced hooding routinely at the Fortress Prison of Breendonck (Belgium), but it was generally uncommon. Hooding became more common after World War II, in the age of stealthy torture. Hooding does not simply confuse prisoners, making them more vulnerable and confused. It also deprives the prisoner of information about what was done, who did it, and where it happened, making their public testimony less useful.
In the 1950s, hooding appeared in South Africa and French-occupied Algeria (1950s). Torturers used it commonly in Brazil and Spain (1960s), Northern Ireland, Chile, Argentina, and Israel (1970s), and in many other countries since then (notably Bolivia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Indonesia, El Salvador, and Honduras). Forced standing on an object is far less common than hooding. It was commonly practiced in only three countries in the twentieth century (chronologically): Venezuela (wheel rims), South Africa (bricks), and Brazil (cans). Attaching electric wires to force the victim to keep his balance was known only in Brazil (“the Vietnam”). Sometimes practices speak louder than words.