I am reading a book about Iraqi torture under Saddam and it occurred to me how specialized this skill was. The point being to bring the person close to death without actually killing them. You couldn’t just read a book on it, there would have to be some apprenticeship.
What countries would I go to that welcome potential torturers like myself?
Is there a cost for the program? Do I get a certificate to hang on my wall?
In particular, the American torturers are not particularly into the physical harm but the psychological. Where is the American university of torture? Do these guys have a special title?
I would WAG it’s a mentoring situation, not a schooling that anyone wit the bucks can obtain a degree to hang on their wall. Much like the crafts and trades in the past you have to know someone willing to mentor you in such skills, and that person can have the proper doors open for you to practice your trade.
But check online, you man find a non-accredited university willing to issue a degree with some online study or the right amount of cash.
All the torturers I know started off as Apprentice Pesterers. They had to spend a few years as Journeymen Abusers before finally being certified as Master Tormenters. As they tell it, the process is quite a pain.
You could see if the Quisition would take you. Their employees are mostly well-adjusted family types:
I quibble with your definition of the point of torture, “The point being to bring the person close to death without actually killing them.” Surgeons do that everyday, so that’s not the point of torturing people.
The points are to get information and instill terror in the populace. The Gulag Archipelago is a good place to view a practical example of the second point. For the first, I thought it had been established that techniques such as “Fear up/Ego down”, supplemented with whatever chemical or environmental means to reduce resistance and induce infantilization in the subject—sleeplessness, drugs, white noise, sensory deprivation—were more effective at gaining usable information than simply sticking the subject in a cellar and beating the crap out of hir. Alternately, repeatedly talking to the subject and identifying narrative inconsistencies—as police officers do everyday—seems to work well, provided the interrogator is fluent in the subject’s language and knowledgeable of local habits and idioms typical of the subject. It also helps to have a database from prior interrogations, in order to validate responses and shock the subject with supposedly secret details. Again, all of this is covered in books like The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Dolgun’s biography, or for that matter, any modern police detective’s memoirs. In the United States, if you wanted to learn how to get information out of people, I’d recommend learning how to be a peace officer, joining a large department, and working one’s way up to detective.
Edit: If anyone has any statistics or cites for the effectiveness of various interrogation techniques, beyond memoirs of the French Algerian experience, the American experience in SouthWest Asia, or of Nazi/Wehrmacht interrogations during WWII. I’m sure they’d be useful. I’d find them interesting, at least. Of course, I could always dig up one of the gazillion torture threads that are on the Dope, I suppose.
If instead, you’re just a sadist who wants to kick the shit out of people, then I would imagine it would proceed as kanicbird describes: join a torturing group as an apprentice, proceed through Lonnie Athens’s four stages of violent socialization, and work your way through the ranks. It would then consist, I imagine, of on the job training. The Gulag Archipelago has a list of the tortures one could look forward to during interrogation. Doubtless there are others.
Very intersting and I would agree that these methods would be more effective. The Iraqi prisoners I am reading about are all innocent people and the continued beating and electrocutions did nothing from an information standpoint since they had nothing to give in the first place.
You generally have to work your way into torture from law enforcement, the military, or intelligence. If you’re a cop, and you like to torture suspects, whenever there’s a guy that needs to be tortured your boss will call you in, because normal people hate to do it. So when they arrest the guy who they think murdered the little girl, they say, “Put him in an interrogation room with blood63 for a while, and see what happens.” Your superiors come to rely on you when they need to extract a confession, and you develop a reputation among your colleagues.
And since you’re so good at getting suspects to confess, you might get moved to assignments where torture isn’t just something you do now and then, it’s something your superiors expect as a matter of routine. And so you move to the task force investigating political crimes, rather than routine street crime.
So it isn’t a matter of, “Well, we need a torturer. Let’s look in the yellow pages and put up an ad in the paper”. Instead it’s “We’re going to need some tough guys on this assignment. I hear blood63 is a real hardass, let’s bring him over from vice.”
I would think there would be more to it than this. Intelligence services from different countries must offer training. For instance, someone had to come up with waterboarding. Other countries pick this up from an exchange of expertise.
Well, my understanding is that specific techniques in the recent torture program such as waterboarding, stress positions, sleep deprivation, and so on, were derived from SERE training, where servicemembers who might be captured were exposed to various techniques that enemy governments might use against them. And the hope was that by training them about what might happen it would help our guys resist. And so the guys playing the prison guards read up on the techniques used by the Communists in the Vietnam war, and copied them. And the CIA or whoever read up on the techniques used in SERE and copied them.
Or, just read “The Gulag Archipelago”, where Solzhenitsyn outlines the typical techniques used by the Soviets. These techniques aren’t particularly obscure. Splash a prisoner with water and make them stand in a cold cell for hours. Don’t let them sleep. Chain them in uncomfortable positions that become agonizing over the hours. Take away their clothes.
People have this idea that real torture involves medieval-style implements. But the Soviets proved that all that paraphernalia was unnecessary, and that unending cold, hunger, thirst, humiliation, isolation and fatigue were enough for anyone, and they would eventually gladly sign their own death warrants just to end it.
Indeed. If saw an account by a ex-NKVD man on torture techniques. He said the first thing they did with a prisoner was throw him in a cell that would not allow a person to stand upright, sit, or lay down at all. Then they’d leave him there for three or four days while they got on with other work. When they pulled him out, he was already broken and ready to talk without the interrogators having to do any work.
My impression is that a good deal of torture isn’t very scientific, just beatings and harassment rather than a methodical intent to inflict pain based on an understanding of anatomy and physiology.
Causing pain is pretty easy, so it shouldn’t be that hard.
Even when torture is done with a scientific effort to cause the most suffering and weakening of willpower as possible, it probably wouldn’t require that much training to do. The pattern (to my non-trained eye) seems to be first destroy the person’s sense of identity and consistency (weird hours, sleep/food/water deprivation, no contact with anyone, uncomfortable quarters, shock arrest and detention, sensory deprivation, sexual assault), then inflict pain/torment on a weakened identity while using interrogation techniques to extract information, then offer a path to get the pain to end and some rewards (If you cooperate I will get the charges reduced, I will find someone to get your kids an education, I will make sure nobody attacks your family, I will keep this out of the papers so you can keep your prestige, etc).