Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 Academy Award-nominated BBC documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney. The film focuses around the controversial death in custody of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar. Dilawar was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base. Taxi to the Dark Side also goes on to examine America's policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA's use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. There is description of the opposition to the use of torture from its political and military opponents, as well as the defence of such methods; the attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and the popularisation of the use of torture techniques in shows such as 24. The film is said to be the first film to contain images taken within Bagram Air Base. On November 19, 2007, Taxi to the Dark Side was named by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of 15 films on its documentary feature Oscar shortlist, and was ultimately one of five films nominated for a prize in the "Best Documentary Feature" category. [this description adapted from http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2987535946644608661 (in my experience not reliable in loading the video; the video is not as good to watch as it is at the link second below; and this version has an entirely gratuitous little berserker bit added at the start {this version also available at http://www.truveo.com/Taxi-to-the-Dark-Side-BBC-Uploaded-for/id/2234669915 })]
Another chance to hear Taxi to the Dark Side - a fascinating, moving and detailed look at American abuses of prisoners in the so called 'war on terror'.
It started as a documentary film and was co-funded by BBC Television as part of their 'Why Democracy?' season.
Directed by the acclaimed American documentary maker Alex Gibney, the film won an Oscar for best documentary 2008.
It is a chilling and compelling account of torture, abuse and murder, of an innocent taxi driver named Dilawar in the US prison at Bagram airbase, Afghanistan.
Such was the film's power and superb journalism that BBC World Service commissioned a half hour radio version of the two hour film.
On December 01 2002, Dilawar, a young Afghan taxi driver, took three passengers for a ride. He never returned home.
Travelling back from Khowst he was stopped by a group of Afghan militia men and arrested on suspicion of involvement in a rocket attack on camp Salerno, along with his passengers.
Dilawar was taken to Bagram prison, an old Soviet airbase used by US forces to collect and interrogate thousands of detainees from Afghanistan and Pakistan, on December 05 2002.
Five days later he was dead, brutally beaten by American troops during his interrogation.
Was his torture and abuse the work of a few rogue soldiers? Or, was it officially approved by the Pentagon?
Alex Gibney narrates this chilling report on the use of extreme violence on prisoners in Bagram and Abu Ghraib and asks what lessons have been learned about the use of torture by American troops?
there was also a longer theatrical release of "Taxi to the Dark Side" in 2008:
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Taxi to the Dark Side (2008)
Rated: R for disturbing images, and content involving torture and graphic nudity.
Runtime: 1 hr 46 mins
Genre: Education/General Interest
Theatrical Release: Jan 18, 2008 Limited
Synopsis: Alex Gibney's TAXI FROM THE DARK SIDE is a perpetually shocking documentary about the Bush administration's use of torture when dealing with political prisoners, with a particular focus on those captured in Iraq and Afghanistan. The title of Gibney's movie is derived from the treatment meted out to an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar, who was mistakenly fingered as a terrorist, then killed during a torture session conducted by American troops. Despite the title, Dilawar's case is just a small part in Gibney's jigsaw, as the director uses excruciating and comprehensive details surrounding the taxi driver's death as a starting point in his search for the people who have permitted such incidents to occur. Gut-wrenching and fully uncensored pictures from Abu-Ghraib feature alongside interviews with military personnel (some of whom tortured Dilawar) as Gibney's search slowly heads into the upper echelons of the military and, ultimately, into the Bush regime itself. TAXI TO THE DARK SIDE is a powerful, well-executed piece of filmmaking. Gibney's skills as a director come to the fore as he manages to pull some surprisingly candid revelations from his subjects, while his choice of newsreel clips featuring the likes of Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld are extremely well chosen. Perhaps the most eye-opening scenes come from a press trip to the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay, where Gibney and others are given a tour of the facilities, including the site gift shop, where gallows humor is stretched to breaking point with the sale of souvenir t-shirts bearing the legend Behavior Modification Instructor. The film concludes with Gibney pulling the focus back to Dilawar once again, highlighting the futility of his death as a number of commentators show how torture isn't, and never has been, an effective method for extracting information from people.
"Put people in crazy situations and people do crazy things." - Pfc. Damien Corsetti, Bagram, Afghanistan
Winner of the 2008 Academy Award® for Best Documentary Feature as well as a 2008 Peabody Award, Taxi to the Dark Side takes a disturbing in-depth look at the highly questionable interrogation practices used by United States military guards on prisoners in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay in the years following 9/11. Beginning with the story of an innocent young Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who was killed while being held in Bagram prison in 2002, Taxi to the Dark Side tells the grim, cautionary saga of how the U.S. government, desperate to draw out information from a top Al Qaeda leader detained in Guantanamo Bay, approved the use of cruel and unusual interrogation techniques that bordered on torture - which were systematically imported to other US prisons abroad. In examining the interrogation practices used in Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, the film includes shocking photos, archival footage, expert commentary, and interviews with several soldiers stationed at prisons in Afghanistan and Iraq. These guards admit to using unorthodox techniques - including isolation, ceiling handcuffing, sleep deprivation, strip humiliation, "water boarding," threats by menacing dogs, sexual abuse and more - that they say were condoned and even approved by their superiors, despite being in clear violation of the humanitarian rules outlined in the Geneva Conventions.
The title of Taxi to the Dark Side refers, first, to an Afghan cabbie named Dilawar, who was apprehended by U.S. soldiers in 2002 and detained in the Bagram Air Base prison, where he died of wounds to the lower extremities after four days. Second, it evokes a statement VP Dick Cheney made to Tim Russert a few days after the 9/11 attacks. "We also have to work the dark side, if you will," said Cheney of our strategy to bring terrorists to justice. "We've got to spend time in the shadows in the intelligence world."
Taxi to the Dark Side examines the growing abuse within U.S. military prisons abroad, starting with the case of Mohammad al-Qahtani, a suspected "20th hijacker" of 9/11 who was subjected to new, humiliating interrogation tactics in an attempt to get him to reveal information in Guantanamo Bay. With the apparent approval of Sec. of State Rumsfeld, these tactics were imported to Iraq and Afghanistan, where guards subjected detainees to increasingly sadistic acts. As the film shows, after the now-famous Abu Ghraib prison photos were published in 2004, many soldiers were brought to trial, discharged and/or imprisoned - but the damage had already been done.
Taxi to the Dark Side opened to stellar reviews upon theatrical release, earning numerous awards including Best Documentary at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and Best Documentary Screenplay at the 2008 Writers Guild of America Awards.
Taxi to the Dark Side was written, produced, directed and narrated by Alex Gibney, who is also responsible for the Oscar®-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, The Trials of Henry Kissinger and other films. Gibney's father Frank, a U.S. veteran who died before the documentary was completed, had urged his son to make the film.
Written & Directed by Alex Gibney; Produced by Alex Gibney, Eva Orner & Susannah Shipman; Executive Producers: Don Glascoff, Robert Johnson & Sidney Blumenthal and Jedd Wider & Todd Wider; Editor: Sloane Klevin; Cinematography: Maryse Alberti & Greg Andracke; Co-Producers: Marty Fisher, Blair Foster & Sloane Klevin; Original Music by Ivor Guest and Robert Logan; Additional Music By Mario Grigorov; Narrated by Alex Gibney.
Reports Shows Additional Undisclosed Surveillance Programs — And Likely Unlawful Conduct by Bush Administration
A new government report has disclosed that President Bush authorized secret surveillance activities that went beyond the previously disclosed NSA program – raising the prospect of additional unlawful conduct by the Bush Administration. At the same time, a House member has revealed that CIA Director Leon Panetta has shutdown a program that was never revealed to Congress in direct violation of federal law. I discussed these stories on this segment of MSNBC Countdown.
In a notable change, the report now describes the entire program as the “President’s Surveillance Program,” going beyond the domestic surveillance program. It also highlights the individual who is most accountable for criminal violations as well as the failure of the Obama Administration to allow investigations into unlawful surveillance or torture. As the evidence of such unlawful conduct mounts, the blocking of a criminal investigation by Attorney General Holder grows more serious as an abdication of his oath to uphold our laws.
Notably, the “usual suspects” refused to be interviewed: former CIA Director George Tenet, former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card; former top Cheney aide David Addington; and John Yoo, who served as a deputy assistant attorney general. Given the potential incrimination prospects, they have at least acted in deference to the criminal code even as Holder appears to ignore it.
It was also disclosed that CIA Director Leon Panetta has terminated a “very serious” covert program kept secret from Congress for eight years. Rep. Jan Schakowsky disclosed the violation of federal law, but once again Congress is silent on holding anyone accountable.
Defending torture insistently means one's moral compass is pointing straight down to hell. I continue to believe it's essential to confront the dangerous and evil lie that torture "works" and that we're all going to die if we respect human rights, follow the law, or dare to investigate - let alone prosecute - the people responsible for these horribly shameful and criminal policies. However, as many have noted, that we are "debating" torture's usefulness at all means we've failed somehow as a society. As Scott Horton [ http://www.harpers.org/archive/2008/12/hbc-90004059 ] quipped in December 2008, "Perhaps for Christmas proper we’ll be treated to arguments for and against genocide, and on the fourth day of Christmas we’ll read the arguments for and against the practice of infanticide."
There are valid reasons why we haven’t had enough with “torture sanctimony,” as Christopher Buckley puts it in an article in The Daily Beast, and let me start with the most important—it’s going to cost us future American lives in addition to the ones we’ve already lost.
Our policy of torture and abuse of prisoners has been Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool, a point that Buckley does not mention and is also conspicuously absent from former CIA Director General Michael Hayden and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s argument in the Wall Street Journal. As the senior interrogator in Iraq for a task force charged with hunting down Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former Al Qaida leader and mass murderer, I listened time and time again to captured foreign fighters cite the torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo as their main reason for coming to Iraq to fight. Consider that 90 percent of the suicide bombers in Iraq are these foreign fighters and you can easily conclude that we have lost hundreds, if not thousands, of American lives because of our policy of torture and abuse. But that’s only the past...
Former officials who say that we prevented terrorist attacks by waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Muhammad or Abu Zubaydah are possibly intentionally ignorant of the fact that their actions cost us American lives. And let’s not forget the glaring failure in these cases. Torture never convinced either of these men to sell out Osama Bin Laden.
These policies have been extremely harmful, and additionally, the various defenses for these abuses just don't hold up to scrutiny. As DDay [ http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/very-slow-ticking-time-bomb-scenario-by.html ] noted on sleep deprivation, "a technique that takes 11 days to break a prisoner is most definitely NOT a technique used in reaction to an imminent plot, particularly not a ticking time bomb scenario." ("Break" in this context would almost certainly amount to the prisoner submitting to his captors' power, not necessarily providing accurate intel, even though the pro-torture crowd often mistakenly or intentionally conflates the two.) Emptywheel [ http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/18/khalid-sheikh-mohammed-was-waterboarded-183-times-in-one-month/ ] was the first to observe, "according to the May 30, 2005 Bradbury memo, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times in March 2003 and Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002." As John Cole [ http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=20162 ] commented, "There better be a pretty damned long fuse on that ticking time bomb. And yes, this is nothing but pure sadism."
To me, these poll results demonstrate the genius of the Cheney strategy, which is to keep the argument limited to what happened at the black sites, which have an aura of "24" to them. The torture there was still inexcusable, but I guess forgiveable to many.
I doubt they would feel the same way if they were shown proof of a direct relationship between Bush policy and not just the torture of "high value" detainees, but also the vile abuse of garden-variety suspects at Guantanamo and Bagram, and of mostly innocent Iraqis at Abu Ghraib.
Has Dick Cheney told the truth or been accurate about anything of consequence at this point? Is there some reason to let him dictate the "debate" or take anything he says at face value, unverified, even when a mountain of evidence calls him out as delusional or a self-serving [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-13/cheneys-role-deepens/full/ ] liar [ http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/mindset-by-digby-im-watching-leering.html ]? (Or is basic journalism just too "impolite"?) These abuses were not isolated incidents, nor the result of a few bad apples [ http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/hbc-90004898 ]. People were tortured and sometimes killed as a direct result of widespread, deliberate policies of abuse dictated from the very top. There is no serious dispute on this. The media haven't done a good job of making all this clear and pushing back against the liars who claim otherwise. And as Matthew Alexander [ http://harpers.org/archive/2008/12/hbc-90004036 ] puts it, "The American public has a right to know that they do not have to choose between torture and terror." The media as a whole have not helped spread the word about that, either.
We need a full investigation – and one without immunity handed out beforehand. We need as much disclosure as possible. For all the recent bluster from torture apologists urging the release of documents, the smarter among them only want cherry-picked releases [ http://attackerman.firedoglake.com/2009/04/24/what-dick-cheney-wants-dick-cheney-is-going-to-get/ ] and not the full picture. They want to prevent a trial at all costs. That's why it's essential to call Cheney's bluff [ http://voices.washingtonpost.com/white-house-watch/torture/call-cheneys-bluff.html ] on the document and investigation front. Surely, if these people are right, a full investigation and disclosure will exonerate them. Surely it's the only way they will be vindicated. That's the political gamesmanship, but the law itself is quite clear. The proper place for Bush officials to be offering their defenses is under oath, as part of a full and thorough investigation and/or on trial. An investigation is what's required by law given the clearly credible allegations of torture, and Bush officials could offer all their shifting defenses and "evidence" there. There is absolutely no good reason to believe the same or similar abuses won't happen again if we don't look at what happened. As retired Major General Antonio Taguba [ http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2008/06/retired-gen-tag.html ] states, "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account."
This is not a game. These torture "debates" should not be thought experiments divorced from objective reality, history [ http://harpers.org/archive/2009/05/hbc-90004913 ], the known timeline and the very real and deadly consequences of these policies. It's one thing for members of the general public to be confused or not be up to date on the general timeline and key details [ http://emptywheel.firedoglake.com/2009/04/17/the-bybee-memo-cant-be-used-for-good-faith-defense-on-water-boarding/ ], or be swayed by fantastical ticking time bomb scenarios. It's one thing for the bloodthirsty chickenhawks who assume every Muslim or Arab prisoner [ http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/09/hinderaker-shows-us-central-defect-in.html ] is a guilty terrorist [ http://www.ourfuture.org/blog-entry/2008114507/using-justice-against-us ] to indulge in their ignorant, self-flattering Jack Bauer fantasies of living in the "real world" of tough decisions. It's inexcusable that so many members of the media still - still - know and/or report these matters so poorly. We deserve and need better. It's not hyperbole to say that people are dead because of these policies [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-05-05/how-many-were-tortured-to-death/full/ ]. Given what we already know, how can we turn away? This is not a game to those who were tortured, nor to the families and friends of those tortured, abused, maimed and killed. It is not a game to human rights activists trying to end abuses around the world. It's not a game to the JAGs and other lawyers trying to ensure fair trials and treatment for their clients, guilty and innocent alike. Contrary to the grotesque bullying tactics, shameless lies or colossal self-deception of the Cheney family and their kind [ http://obsidianwings.blogs.com/obsidian_wings/2009/05/how-dare-he.html ], it's not a game to the American and coalition troops attacked, injured, maimed or killed as a result of arrogant, feckless leadership and reckless, unconscionable and evil policies.
Torturing Democracy [ http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/torturingdemocracy/program/ (the post to which this post is a reply)] - the full documentary can be viewed online. (PBS chose not to air it before the end of the Bush administration, probably due to external pressure.)
Mark Danner wrote two key pieces in the New York Review of Books in April 2009, "US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22530 ]" and "The Red Cross Torture Report: What It Means [ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22614 ]." The first piece lead [sic - 'led'] to the release of the Red Cross report.
"It's Our Cage, Too [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/16/AR2007051602395.html ]" (5/17/07) by Charles C. Krulak and Joseph P. Hoar, who write that "torture betrays us and breeds new enemies." ("Charles C. Krulak was commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999. Joseph P. Hoar was commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994.")
"My Tortured Decision [ http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/23/opinion/23soufan.html ]" (4/22/09) by Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator who questioned Abu Zubaydah, and confirmed and fleshed out earlier accounts. Crucially, any actionable intelligence was obtained before Abu Zubaydah was tortured.
I could easily keep going, and feel free to pass on any recommendations in the comments. Other posts have and will continue to take on specific torture apologist arguments. In the future, I may try to put together a torture primer of some sort, covering most of the arguments we've seen. But the most important task now is to push for a full investigation.
(Edited for clarity, and a few sentences and links added to paragraph 5 of the piece proper. It was a late night.)
Update 5/16/09: In comments, johnsturgeon and Nell of A Lovely Promise [ http://alovelypromise.blogspot.com/ ] have recommended and linked the work of Alfred McCoy, a history professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Thanks again for the recommendations. At least a half-dozen sites cover the latest factual revelations and political gambits on torture diligently (VS is not a breaking news site), and it seems most readers have at least one good source. I don't know about anybody else, but I read "we fight to build a free world" as both a rebuke and an inspiration. Thanks to everyone who's keeping the pressure up on these issues.
Update 5/19/09: Marcy Wheeler (Emptywheel) has a great article for Salon, "The 13 people who made torture possible [ http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/05/18/torture/ ]," which serves as a good introduction or refresher on the key players and the basic timeline.
Copyright 2009 Vagabond Scholar (emphasis in original)
http://vagabondscholar.blogspot.com/2009/05/torture-versus-freedom.html [with comments] [quite a few of the items linked in the above have also been posted here; this time I didn't go look up those posts here to directly include their links here with the source links in the above, as the above is already way more than sufficiently stuffed full of links, and most if not all of those posts here are already in or linked into this string of posts]
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Torture's Long Shadow
By Vladimir Bukovsky Sunday, December 18, 2005; Page B01
CAMBRIDGE, England
One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. "But, Comrade Stalin," stammered Beria, "five suspects have already confessed to stealing it."
This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain's amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.
This is a new debate for Americans, but there is no need for you to reinvent the wheel. Most nations can provide you with volumes on the subject. Indeed, with the exception of the Black Death, torture is the oldest scourge on our planet (hence there are so many conventions against it). Every Russian czar after Peter the Great solemnly abolished torture upon being enthroned, and every time his successor had to abolish it all over again. These czars were hardly bleeding-heart liberals, but long experience in the use of these "interrogation" practices in Russia had taught them that once condoned, torture will destroy their security apparatus. They understood that torture is the professional disease of any investigative machinery.
Apart from sheer frustration and other adrenaline-related emotions, investigators and detectives in hot pursuit have enormous temptation to use force to break the will of their prey because they believe that, metaphorically speaking, they have a "ticking bomb" case on their hands. But, much as a good hunter trains his hounds to bring the game to him rather than eating it, a good ruler has to restrain his henchmen from devouring the prey lest he be left empty-handed. Investigation is a subtle process, requiring patience and fine analytical ability, as well as a skill in cultivating one's sources. When torture is condoned, these rare talented people leave the service, having been outstripped by less gifted colleagues with their quick-fix methods, and the service itself degenerates into a playground for sadists. Thus, in its heyday, Joseph Stalin's notorious NKVD (the Soviet secret police) became nothing more than an army of butchers terrorizing the whole country but incapable of solving the simplest of crimes. And once the NKVD went into high gear, not even Stalin could stop it at will. He finally succeeded only by turning the fury of the NKVD against itself; he ordered his chief NKVD henchman, Nikolai Yezhov (Beria's predecessor), to be arrested together with his closest aides.
So, why would democratically elected leaders of the United States ever want to legalize what a succession of Russian monarchs strove to abolish? Why run the risk of unleashing a fury that even Stalin had problems controlling? Why would anyone try to "improve intelligence-gathering capability" by destroying what was left of it? Frustration? Ineptitude? Ignorance? Or, has their friendship with a certain former KGB lieutenant colonel, V. Putin, rubbed off on the American leaders? I have no answer to these questions, but I do know that if Vice President Cheney is right and that some "cruel, inhumane or degrading" (CID) treatment of captives is a necessary tool for winning the war on terrorism, then the war is lost already.
Even talking about the possibility of using CID treatment sends wrong signals and encourages base instincts in those who should be consistently delivered from temptation by their superiors. As someone who has been on the receiving end of the "treatment" under discussion, let me tell you that trying to make a distinction between torture and CID techniques is ridiculous. Long gone are the days when a torturer needed the nasty-looking tools displayed in the Tower of London. A simple prison bed is deadly if you remove the mattress and force a prisoner to sleep on the iron frame night after night after night. Or how about the "Chekist's handshake" so widely practiced under Stalin -- a firm squeeze of the victim's palm with a simple pencil inserted between his fingers? Very convenient, very simple. And how would you define leaving 2,000 inmates of a labor camp without dental service for months on end? Is it CID not to treat an excruciatingly painful toothache, or is it torture?
Now it appears that sleep deprivation is "only" CID and used on Guantanamo Bay captives. Well, congratulations, comrades! It was exactly this method that the NKVD used to produce those spectacular confessions in Stalin's "show trials" of the 1930s. The henchmen called it "conveyer," when a prisoner was interrogated nonstop for a week or 10 days without a wink of sleep. At the end, the victim would sign any confession without even understanding what he had signed.
I know from my own experience that interrogation is an intensely personal confrontation, a duel of wills. It is not about revealing some secrets or making confessions, it is about self-respect and human dignity. If I break, I will not be able to look into a mirror. But if I don't, my interrogator will suffer equally. Just try to control your emotions in the heat of that battle. This is precisely why torture occurs even when it is explicitly forbidden. Now, who is going to guarantee that even the most exact definition of CID is observed under such circumstances?
But if we cannot guarantee this, then how can you force your officers and your young people in the CIA to commit acts that will scar them forever? For scarred they will be, take my word for it.
In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner -- through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.
The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man -- my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It'll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can't do that. . . . " And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.
Today, when the White House lawyers seem preoccupied with contriving a way to stem the flow of possible lawsuits from former detainees, I strongly recommend that they think about another flood of suits, from the men and women in your armed services or the CIA agents who have been or will be engaged in CID practices. Our rich experience in Russia has shown that many will become alcoholics or drug addicts, violent criminals or, at the very least, despotic and abusive fathers and mothers.
If America's leaders want to hunt terrorists while transforming dictatorships into democracies, they must recognize that torture, which includes CID, has historically been an instrument of oppression -- not an instrument of investigation or of intelligence gathering. No country needs to invent how to "legalize" torture; the problem is rather how to stop it from happening. If it isn't stopped, torture will destroy your nation's important strategy to develop democracy in the Middle East. And if you cynically outsource torture to contractors and foreign agents, how can you possibly be surprised if an 18-year-old in the Middle East casts a jaundiced eye toward your reform efforts there?
Finally, think what effect your attitude has on the rest of the world, particularly in the countries where torture is still common, such as Russia, and where its citizens are still trying to combat it. Mr. Putin will be the first to say: "You see, even your vaunted American democracy cannot defend itself without resorting to torture. . . . "
Off we go, back to the caves.
Vladimir Bukovsky, who spent nearly 12 years in Soviet prisons, labor camps and psychiatric hospitals for nonviolent human rights activities, is the author of several books, including "To Build a Castle" and "Judgment in Moscow." Now 63, he has lived primarily in Cambridge, England, since 1976.