BOOK

Excerpt from introduction to Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali (2008, Princeton University Press). Dr. Rejali is professor of political science at Reed College and also author of Torture and Modernity: Self, Society and State in Iran (Westview 1994). Publisher's note on Torture and Democracy: "This is the most comprehensive, and most comprehensively chilling, study of modern torture yet written. Darius Rejali, one of the world's leading experts on torture, takes the reader from the late nineteenth century to the aftermath of Abu Ghraib, from slavery and the electric chair to electrotorture in American inner cities, and from French and British colonial prison cells and the Spanish-American War to the fields of Vietnam, the wars of the Middle East, and the new democracies of Latin America and Europe."

INTRODUCTION
On March 3, 1991, police pulled over Rodney King and two other passengers in Los Angeles. Most Americans saw how that incident ended. LAPD officers beat King senseless with metal batons. Many will remember that police fractured King's face and legs. How many remember the number of times police fired electric stun weapons at King during the incident? How many can say how much shock passed through his body as he lay on the ground?

From the start, the King incident was about the sudden remarkable visibility of police violence captured, by happenstance, on amateur video. As the Christopher Commission stated, "Whether there even would have been a Los Angeles Police Department investigation without the video is doubtful, since the efforts of King's brother, Paul, to file a complaint were frustrated, and the report of the involved officers was falsified."

Even a careful viewer of the amateur video would not see the police using electroshock. Sergeant Stacey Koon tased Rodney King thrice, twice prior to when the video started running and once in the course of the video. To tase means to use a Tommy A. Swift Electric Rifle (T.A.S.E.R). Tasers fire two darts trailed by long wires. Once the darts catch onto the clothing or body, the operator depresses a button, releasing electric charge from the batteries along the wires to the target. Koon's Taser model possessed two dart cartridges. Koon lodged the first pair of darts on King's back and the second on his upper chest. Each discharge delivered short pulses of 50,000 volts, eight to fifteen pulses per second.

The pain was not trivial. The California Highway Patrol officer said King was "writhing." LAPD officer Timothy Wind stated that King "was shouting incoherently from the pain of the taser." Even Koon, who was nine feet away, declared, "He's groaning like a wounded animal, and I can see the vibrations on him." While Officer Laurence Powell beat King on video, Koon depressed the button a third time, draining whatever charge was left in the batteries. This was not a trivial discharge either. LAPD recruits knew that whoever touched a tased victim would also "get zapped. They don't become unconscious . . . they just go down." Officer Ted Briseno claims that he intervened at this point to stop the beating. Koon and Wind believe that "Briseno wasn't trying to stop the violence; he was trying to prevent the TASER charge from hitting Powell and Wind." At any rate, the third tase didn't subdue King, and the beating continued.

If these beatings led to the Los Angeles Riots of 1992, the multiple high-voltage shocks barely impinged on public consciousness. Indeed, what would have happened if King had suffered no fractures, only the mere burn of the Taser? At the trial, the defense produced Dr. Dallas Long to contest whether there even was a burn scar. As Koon puts it, "Rodney King had no burn; a TASER dart doesn't leave one."

A democratic public may be outraged by violence it can see, but how likely is it that we will get outraged about violence like this, that may or may not leave traces, violence that we can hardly be sure took place at all? A victim with scars to show to the media will get sympathy or at least attention, but victims without scars do not have much to authorize their complaints to a skeptical public. A trial can focus on the specific damages of a beating--where did the blows allegedly fall? Were the strikes professional, necessary or neither?--but what precisely can a trial focus on with electric shocks that leave few marks? Some argue we are desensitized to violence we see on the evening news, but about violence we can't see--even when its effects lie before our eyes, shaping very flow of traffic on our streets--we cannot reflect, much less react.

This book explores the disturbing implications of the truth that we are less likely to complain about violence committed by stealth. Indeed, we are less likely even to have the opportunity to complain. I use "we" deliberately, referring to people of modern states, and especially democracies. Dictators generally have no interest in violence that leaves no marks; intimidation can require that they leave bloody traces of their power in every public square. We may think that most clean tortures came to us from Hitler or Stalin, but we would do well to look closer to home.

For wherever citizens gather freely to review public power or name violent injustice, we are also more likely to see covert violence. In democracies, the police, the military, and the secret services are constrained by constitutions and monitored by judges and internal review boards, by a free press, and by human rights organizations. Officers, agents, and soldiers who decide that brutality is required, of their own accord or with quiet encouragement from above, will put a premium on "methods which cause suffering and intimidation without leaving much in the way of embarrassing long-term visible evidence of brutality."

The logic of this dynamic, of the incentives and disincentives created by the tensions between authority and public monitoring, is certainly thought-provoking in itself. This book goes further, arguing that, historically, public monitoring and stealth torture have an unnerving affinity. It is a relationship, moreover, that has been aided by the modern technologies that, put to other uses, make our lives physically comfortable, even pleasurable. I seek to show that where free elections have gone, where monitoring agencies have set up shop, and journalists have taken to the streets and airwaves, they have been followed by electric prods and electroshockers, tortures by water and ice, drugs of sinister variety, sonic devices--and also by methods that are less technical, but no less sophisticated or painful; the modern democratic torturer knows how to beat a suspect senseless without leaving a mark.

But this book does more than describe complex patterns of torture techniques and offer explanations for their distribution. Torture and Democracy is also designed as an accessible and reliable sourcebook for citizens. No one these days is particularly surprised that torture has its supporters even in democracies. Since September 11, 2001, American officials have acknowledged using well-known coercive techniques on prisoners, and some influential Americans have justified torture in certain cases. And since Abu Ghraib, the world has become familiar with iconic images of American torture. Most people, though, don't know about the painful but clean tortures that now characterize so much policing around the world. And few would recognize the torture of the Hooded Man of Abu Ghraib or its effects if police used this procedure on someone in their neighborhood.

If global monitoring of torture is to succeed in eliminating these clean tortures, citizens need to understand clearly what these techniques are, where they come from, and what they do. Being able to talk intelligently about these techniques is not simply a cognitive ability that promotes better research on torture, but a necessary civic skill. Citizens who cannot speak competently about cruelty are unable to protect themselves against tyranny and injustice...

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