"Torture has never gotten anyone to talk!"

“What he described to me, what he endured at Guantanamo, were methods of torture that we normally see in dictatorships, ones that have serious repercussions. Everyone knows the principle behind psychological torture. You can strip people naked, you can waterboard them, you don’t even have to touch them and you can completely destroy them. The big advantage of psychological torture from the torturer’s point of view is that the effects of the torture last much longer than those of physical torture. Physical torture is quite simple: when you go to the dentist for a painful procedure, you go home and a week later, you’re no longer in pain. Psychological torture constantly haunts you. When you are verbally tormented, when you are humiliated, when someone does repugnant things to you, when someone makes fun of the size of your genitals or others things of that sort, the psychological effects remain. By that I mean, ten years later, fifteen years later, these images, these scenes are still pursuing you. Thus, you feel perpetually tortured.

The psychological scars that these people, that the patients at Parcours d’Exil live with on a daily basis manifest themselves as nightmares, insomnia, feelings of worthlessness, anxiety, and depression. These are the symptoms that are always associated with torture, the ones that we see all the time with our patients here. I see 900 patients a year, and I’ve seen 6,000 over the past 15 years. All of them display the same common set of symptoms. But the major problem is that if these people are not treated and do not receive help, these symptoms will not go away on their own. For example, one of the most efficient, and rather unsavoury methods of torture is when the torturer makes fun of the victim’s physique, and in particular, his or her genitals. This tactic appeals to the torturer because five or ten years later, when these people are in intimate relationships with someone, they are incapable of being naked in front of the other. Every touch, every glance transports them back to the times they were tortured. And so sometimes this completely kills their libido, their sexual life, and their self-esteem. These people can remain definitively-well, if they are not treated-remain scarred for life by what they have endured.

Like everything in America, torture is scientific and standardised, it’s all ‘after 15 seconds this happens, after 30 seconds that happens.’ This approach creates an illusion that precautions are being taken and allows us go on thinking that things are done with the utmost care, that nothing is disproportionate, that clear limits are in place, everything is like that. Personally, I think all that fits into the larger picture of America’s hypocritical attitude towards torture, which is ‘Oh, we don’t torture because we don’t actually touch them.’ Supposedly. In my opinion, these are the lies that get repeated like a broken record. The worst part of America’s great hypocrisy is that it doesn’t torture on American soil. Instead, victims are tortured at Guantanamo, in airplanes, and in foreign countries in which such methods are tolerated, if not welcomed. This allows the US to claim that it doesn’t torture, certainly not in the United States.

Torture has never gotten anyone to talk. Torture simply imposes terror. Torture is designed so that victims no longer speak, no longer move, and that everyone else does the same. Information extracted via torture has never helped us arrest anyone, and that is proven. Torture is absolutely useless in that arena. It is only good for one thing and that is for terrorizing the population. But the majority of tortures are, in my opinion, ‘civil servants of horror.’ The American soldiers who torture are people who are obeying orders, who have lost the ability to say no, to say that it’s impossible for them to carry out. The French soldiers that tortured prisoners in Algeria were also just being obedient.”

Listen to the interview (in French)