Confession under gruesome torture
Monday, 30 March 2009
Maswood Alam Khan
YOU and I cannot inflict torture on an animal, let alone on a human being. But, there are people who don't waver to slaughter an animal, gash a man's cheek with a screwdriver, drill a hole on a live human scull, or gouge out a woman's eyes before slitting her neck with a sharp knife; these people were born as normal as any of us but their nerves have been trained differently. They are in most cases genetically sadists. A little parental care combined with minor clinical treatment during their childhood could save them from developing such animalistic behaviour at the later stage of their life. Ironically, such people are engaged all over the world to perform a special job: "Extract confession from a suspect by means of torture".
I am not sure whether the former US President George W. Bush Jr. was genetically sadist or not. But it is known to all and sundry that President Bush vehemently refused to put an end to torture in the name of civilisation. He vetoed legislation put to him by the Congress that would have outlawed the use of waterboarding (a method of torture approved by CIA) and other controversial enhanced interrogation techniques. You are tied to a board and your ankles, wrists, chest and head are strapped firmly down. Water pours onto your face, flows up your nose, into your mouth, down your throat and fills your lungs and stomach. This is waterboarding. The CIA uses waterboarding to try to extract information from detainees in the 'war on terror'. President George Bush thought it was a 'necessary tool'.
It was during the presidency of George Bush when the world came to learn about the horrendous stories of abuse, torture, sodomy and homicide perpetuated by the US Army and their allied agencies on the prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It was also during the tenure of the same US President when one Khalid Sheikh Mohammad along with four codefendants after undergoing daily torture and starvation for six years in the US-controlled Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba pleaded guilty; they knew their confession means their sure death sentence. Still, they appealed to allow them to confess that they themselves had orchestrated the Sep 11, 2002 terror attack on the US that killed nearly 3,000 people, asking a military judge to take their guilty pleas at once as they said: "We don't want to waste time". He even confessed to planning a terror attack on Plaza Bank of Washington---a target that didn't even exist until three years after his capture. He was a living victim of extreme torture!
Confessing a crime (not committed) and then embracing the death penalty (not justified) on the part of a suspect under continuous torture is tantamount to a freedom from a hell, a heavenly relief from an unbearable anguish, or a blissful resurrection from agonising sufferings a tortured man earnestly craves to find eternal peace in death.
Our home minister the other day told the parliament that six hundred and eighty persons died in the custody of law enforcing agencies after 2002. They died while lawmen had launched drives to arrest them or recover illegal arms from their possessions. Many of them reportedly died of heart attacks and many had committed suicides.
"One more BDR soldier dies" became a familiar headline in newspapers during the interrogation sessions that took place immediately after the BDR carnage in Pilkhana in the last week of February. Newspaper readers whispered to each other to know why BDR soldiers were dying so frequently either of heart attacks or from suicides! Morgue sources quoting inquest reports said that there were marks of blood clots on both hands and legs and also on the back of some of the deceased making it palpably clear that the BDR soldiers before succumbing to heart attacks or committing suicide had undergone some physical tortures. Or, who knows, some of them had perhaps dropped dead while being flogged!
As usual, after autopsy, the bodies of the deceased are to be handed over to the families and the families have to carry the heavy burden of the dead bodies to their respective village homes. Children, wives and parents of the deceased unfurl the dead bodies, find the injury marks on the bodies of their beloved, look askance at the bearers who brought the corpses home and let out their high-pitched wails. After cursing the unknown perpetrators for a while they get too fatigued to cry and the dead are customarily buried. "How and why have they died?" remains for ever an unanswered question buried in their minds. But, the authority concerned owes the orphaned children and widowed wives an explanation, about the deaths. If the aggrieved are denied the explanation the nation must not condone the concerned authority's silence to the widowed and to the orphaned.
We hate and despise with every fiber of our being those members of BDR and their abettors who perpetuated the genocide upon the unarmed and innocent Army officers and their family members and we earnestly demand exemplary punishment of the perpetrators in the quickest possible time. But, we cannot tolerate an attempt to justify torture based upon "an eye for an eye" rationale before the alleged are convicted by a court of law.
Unless there is convincing evidence, the law enforcing agencies have got no right to put a suspect in any interrogation where s/he should feel a little discomfort. It has been proven by the criminologists that torture doesn't work well in extracting confession of a crime. In the first place, people being tortured will say anything to get respite from it. Secondly, people who are willing to kill themselves for their faiths or beliefs historically don't react to torture. Thirdly, countries that used torture to gain intelligence have found that it is useless and in most cases misleading.
By speaking against torture as a means of interrogation I don't want to mean that someone like Syed Tawhidul Alam, deputy assistant director of B.D.R, the prime rebellion suspect, should be given free boarding in a suite of Hotel Sonargaon and fed the best available food to get information from him. There are scores of ways, especially new methods of detecting crimes and identifying criminals based on forensic science, which can help our law enforcement agencies to control crime by bringing the real criminals to books. The use of torture does not increase our security. Torture only serves to perpetrate violence and itself is a form of terror.
There has of course to be interrogation to extract information from suspects being held on remand. When interrogation fails to produce any desired result, the suspects may also be made to undergo what psychologists call "white torture", a type of extremely painful psychological torture that entails sensory deprivation and isolation. But, under no circumstances a suspect or an alleged criminal, even if he is caught red-handed, should undergo beastly methods of torture like applying electric shocks to victims' genitals, heads, ears and legs or suspending the victim from the ceiling by the legs or pulling the suspect's nails by a pair of pliers or keeping the person naked in the cold etc. And if a suspect, may God forbid, dies as a short-term or a long-term result of physical or psychological torture, the victim's relations must be given the maximum latitude of legal shelter to charge the law enforcing custodian with cold-headed murder.
Bangladesh is a signatory of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degradation Treatment or Punishment (In short Convention Against Torture or CAT) which is also signed by the United States and by over 140 countries.
It is ludicrous to think that we claim ourselves as a civilised nation when members of our law enforcement agencies are still dependent on crude tortures and are yet to be trained to treat suspects with civility.
Incidents of mutilated victims, encounter killings, alleged "suicides" in police stations and disappearances are routine in our country. Over the last few decades, there has been mounting evidence that torture has become an institutionalised practice in our society. Many hundreds if not thousands have died because of torture in the past few years. Notwithstanding our country's membership with CAT, torture continues to be rampant in Bangladesh and an integral part of our administrative system---a disgraceful legacy we have borrowed from our past colonial rulers and a black legacy we are leaving behind for our future generations.
Impunity, granted by some loopholes in our Criminal Penal Codes, remains the single most important factor that greatly contributes to torture being inflicted by the members of our police as well as armed forces who are practically immunized by our domestic legislations. It is difficult to imagine that a victim, living under constant fear of intimidation and retaliation by the law enforcing agencies, in spite of having the necessary material resources will ever pluck courage to file in a court of law a criminal suit against a police official or an officer belonging to RAB or Army.
God saved America through Americans electing Obama as their new President. "Civilised" Americans could be yet more inhuman, yet more infamous than the bloody Hitlerites had another Bush been elected last year to carry on torturing the innocent. Bygone however is bygone. Let us forget the past. Let us look ahead. Let there be an end to torture. We no more want to hear shouts and groans of the tortured constantly emanating from the torture chambers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, or in Bangladesh. We no more want to see families bearing the dead bodies of victims killed in extrajudicial executions. And let us hope the interrogators' anger is soon changed to grief and despair on hearing the groans of the tortured and on seeing the blank expression of the orphans who lost their fathers at the hands of extrajudicial executioners.
The writer is a banker who may be reached at maswood@hotmail.com
YOU and I cannot inflict torture on an animal, let alone on a human being. But, there are people who don't waver to slaughter an animal, gash a man's cheek with a screwdriver, drill a hole on a live human scull, or gouge out a woman's eyes before slitting her neck with a sharp knife; these people were born as normal as any of us but their nerves have been trained differently. They are in most cases genetically sadists. A little parental care combined with minor clinical treatment during their childhood could save them from developing such animalistic behaviour at the later stage of their life. Ironically, such people are engaged all over the world to perform a special job: "Extract confession from a suspect by means of torture".
I am not sure whether the former US President George W. Bush Jr. was genetically sadist or not. But it is known to all and sundry that President Bush vehemently refused to put an end to torture in the name of civilisation. He vetoed legislation put to him by the Congress that would have outlawed the use of waterboarding (a method of torture approved by CIA) and other controversial enhanced interrogation techniques. You are tied to a board and your ankles, wrists, chest and head are strapped firmly down. Water pours onto your face, flows up your nose, into your mouth, down your throat and fills your lungs and stomach. This is waterboarding. The CIA uses waterboarding to try to extract information from detainees in the 'war on terror'. President George Bush thought it was a 'necessary tool'.
It was during the presidency of George Bush when the world came to learn about the horrendous stories of abuse, torture, sodomy and homicide perpetuated by the US Army and their allied agencies on the prisoners held in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. It was also during the tenure of the same US President when one Khalid Sheikh Mohammad along with four codefendants after undergoing daily torture and starvation for six years in the US-controlled Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba pleaded guilty; they knew their confession means their sure death sentence. Still, they appealed to allow them to confess that they themselves had orchestrated the Sep 11, 2002 terror attack on the US that killed nearly 3,000 people, asking a military judge to take their guilty pleas at once as they said: "We don't want to waste time". He even confessed to planning a terror attack on Plaza Bank of Washington---a target that didn't even exist until three years after his capture. He was a living victim of extreme torture!
Confessing a crime (not committed) and then embracing the death penalty (not justified) on the part of a suspect under continuous torture is tantamount to a freedom from a hell, a heavenly relief from an unbearable anguish, or a blissful resurrection from agonising sufferings a tortured man earnestly craves to find eternal peace in death.
Our home minister the other day told the parliament that six hundred and eighty persons died in the custody of law enforcing agencies after 2002. They died while lawmen had launched drives to arrest them or recover illegal arms from their possessions. Many of them reportedly died of heart attacks and many had committed suicides.
"One more BDR soldier dies" became a familiar headline in newspapers during the interrogation sessions that took place immediately after the BDR carnage in Pilkhana in the last week of February. Newspaper readers whispered to each other to know why BDR soldiers were dying so frequently either of heart attacks or from suicides! Morgue sources quoting inquest reports said that there were marks of blood clots on both hands and legs and also on the back of some of the deceased making it palpably clear that the BDR soldiers before succumbing to heart attacks or committing suicide had undergone some physical tortures. Or, who knows, some of them had perhaps dropped dead while being flogged!
As usual, after autopsy, the bodies of the deceased are to be handed over to the families and the families have to carry the heavy burden of the dead bodies to their respective village homes. Children, wives and parents of the deceased unfurl the dead bodies, find the injury marks on the bodies of their beloved, look askance at the bearers who brought the corpses home and let out their high-pitched wails. After cursing the unknown perpetrators for a while they get too fatigued to cry and the dead are customarily buried. "How and why have they died?" remains for ever an unanswered question buried in their minds. But, the authority concerned owes the orphaned children and widowed wives an explanation, about the deaths. If the aggrieved are denied the explanation the nation must not condone the concerned authority's silence to the widowed and to the orphaned.
We hate and despise with every fiber of our being those members of BDR and their abettors who perpetuated the genocide upon the unarmed and innocent Army officers and their family members and we earnestly demand exemplary punishment of the perpetrators in the quickest possible time. But, we cannot tolerate an attempt to justify torture based upon "an eye for an eye" rationale before the alleged are convicted by a court of law.
Unless there is convincing evidence, the law enforcing agencies have got no right to put a suspect in any interrogation where s/he should feel a little discomfort. It has been proven by the criminologists that torture doesn't work well in extracting confession of a crime. In the first place, people being tortured will say anything to get respite from it. Secondly, people who are willing to kill themselves for their faiths or beliefs historically don't react to torture. Thirdly, countries that used torture to gain intelligence have found that it is useless and in most cases misleading.
By speaking against torture as a means of interrogation I don't want to mean that someone like Syed Tawhidul Alam, deputy assistant director of B.D.R, the prime rebellion suspect, should be given free boarding in a suite of Hotel Sonargaon and fed the best available food to get information from him. There are scores of ways, especially new methods of detecting crimes and identifying criminals based on forensic science, which can help our law enforcement agencies to control crime by bringing the real criminals to books. The use of torture does not increase our security. Torture only serves to perpetrate violence and itself is a form of terror.
There has of course to be interrogation to extract information from suspects being held on remand. When interrogation fails to produce any desired result, the suspects may also be made to undergo what psychologists call "white torture", a type of extremely painful psychological torture that entails sensory deprivation and isolation. But, under no circumstances a suspect or an alleged criminal, even if he is caught red-handed, should undergo beastly methods of torture like applying electric shocks to victims' genitals, heads, ears and legs or suspending the victim from the ceiling by the legs or pulling the suspect's nails by a pair of pliers or keeping the person naked in the cold etc. And if a suspect, may God forbid, dies as a short-term or a long-term result of physical or psychological torture, the victim's relations must be given the maximum latitude of legal shelter to charge the law enforcing custodian with cold-headed murder.
Bangladesh is a signatory of the United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degradation Treatment or Punishment (In short Convention Against Torture or CAT) which is also signed by the United States and by over 140 countries.
It is ludicrous to think that we claim ourselves as a civilised nation when members of our law enforcement agencies are still dependent on crude tortures and are yet to be trained to treat suspects with civility.
Incidents of mutilated victims, encounter killings, alleged "suicides" in police stations and disappearances are routine in our country. Over the last few decades, there has been mounting evidence that torture has become an institutionalised practice in our society. Many hundreds if not thousands have died because of torture in the past few years. Notwithstanding our country's membership with CAT, torture continues to be rampant in Bangladesh and an integral part of our administrative system---a disgraceful legacy we have borrowed from our past colonial rulers and a black legacy we are leaving behind for our future generations.
Impunity, granted by some loopholes in our Criminal Penal Codes, remains the single most important factor that greatly contributes to torture being inflicted by the members of our police as well as armed forces who are practically immunized by our domestic legislations. It is difficult to imagine that a victim, living under constant fear of intimidation and retaliation by the law enforcing agencies, in spite of having the necessary material resources will ever pluck courage to file in a court of law a criminal suit against a police official or an officer belonging to RAB or Army.
God saved America through Americans electing Obama as their new President. "Civilised" Americans could be yet more inhuman, yet more infamous than the bloody Hitlerites had another Bush been elected last year to carry on torturing the innocent. Bygone however is bygone. Let us forget the past. Let us look ahead. Let there be an end to torture. We no more want to hear shouts and groans of the tortured constantly emanating from the torture chambers in Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, or in Bangladesh. We no more want to see families bearing the dead bodies of victims killed in extrajudicial executions. And let us hope the interrogators' anger is soon changed to grief and despair on hearing the groans of the tortured and on seeing the blank expression of the orphans who lost their fathers at the hands of extrajudicial executioners.
The writer is a banker who may be reached at maswood@hotmail.com