Torture Entrepreneurs

Here’s something interesting (via The Wall Street Journal’s Informed Reader blog):

Democracies generally might not torture as much as totalitarian regimes do, but they did invent a lot of torture’s modern incarnations, writes Darius Rejali, a professor of political science in Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Democracies’ open courts and free press discourage blatant rack-and-thumb-screw torture methods. But in the 20th century that obstacle led police and soldiers in democracies to develop ways to inflict pain but leave no marks on a body, such as electric shock, forced standing, and water boarding. These techniques were honed by the U.S., Great Britain and France and were only afterwards adopted by totalitarian regimes.

According to Rejali, Nazis first picked up the technique of using electric shocks after learning it from the French (who used it in Vietnam). Additionally, waterboarding and forcing prisoners to stand for long periods of time may have been famous Stalinist tactics, but they were encouraged and developed by American police and British soldiers operating in Northern Ireland and the Middle East.