It seems to me that the most startling — and most courageous — sentence in John Conroy’s new book about torture in Chicago and around the world, “Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People” (Knopf), is one that comes in the final pages when Conroy is describing his interview with Jon Burge.
Burge, a much-decorated Chicago police commander, was the central figure in one of three cases of government-inflicted torture in Western democracies that form the core of Conroy’s book.
On Feb. 14, 1982, Burge and his detectives, investigating the murder of two Chicago police officers, arrested Andrew Wilson and took him to their offices at the Area 2 headquarters on the Far South Side. There, according to Wilson, they tortured him for 13 hours.
According to Wilson, he had been beaten and kicked. A plastic bag had been put over his head, cutting off his breathing. The skin of his chest had been scorched when police held him against a hot radiator. He had been burned with cigarettes. And two small generators had been used by Burge and Detective John Yucaitis to administer jolts of electricity to Wilson’s head, hands and thighs.
“It hurts, but it stays in your head, OK? It stays in your head and it grinds your teeth,” Wilson testified concerning the electric shocks he received through wires connected to his ears and nose. “It grinds, constantly grinds, constantly. … The pain just stays in your head. … It’s just like this light here like when it flickers, it flickers … and your teeth constantly grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds and grinds.”
It was bad enough when Yucaitis gave the shocks, Wilson said, but much worse when Burge was at the controls because he continued the shocks much longer.
Eventually, the city’s lawyers acknowledged that Burge had tortured Wilson, the police board fired Burge (although he was allowed to keep his pension), and a federal judge ordered the city to pay more than $1 million in damages.
John Conroy details all of this information in telling Burge’s story (as well as those of torturers in Israel, Northern Ireland and elsewhere). And, although his prose is restrained and sober, there is an undercurrent of shock and anger. Torture, especially by the government officials of a democracy, committed to freedom and human rights, is an abomination to Conroy.
And yet, when Conroy sat down in Burge’s Area 2 office, midway through the court battles, to interview the police veteran, it wasn’t a monster he found sitting there.
In his book, Conroy admits this. And he admits something more. Of Burge, he writes:
“He had a good sense of humor and didn’t seem to take himself too seriously; I enjoyed his company.”
Sitting in a simply furnished conference room in the offices of the Chicago Reader, the weekly newspaper where he has been a staff writer since 1978, Conroy tells me about that meeting with Burge.
“Maybe it’s just me and where I came from,” he says, “but, when I was with Burge, I felt I could have seen him at one of my family’s 4th of July picnics, and, if my widowed aunt said her car wouldn’t start, he’d be the first guy out to fix it.”
There is almost an innocence to the 48-year-old Conroy as he says this. It has nothing to do with a lack of sophistication. He knows that talking about a torturer as just folks is something that can be misconstrued. But there’s an essential honesty to him, an unwillingness — or perhaps an inability — to turn aside from something difficult or dangerous. Or true. (Indeed, Conroy talks about how he still feels guilty for telling a white lie to escape a drunken group of violent toughs in Belfast, the subject of his first book.)
And it’s not just Burge whom Conroy refuses to demonize.
In his book, Conroy writes of how he came to have “a certain respect” for some of the former torturers he interviewed, such as Bruce Moore-King who tortured while in the Rhodesian army:
“Whatever their misdeeds, and they are awful, I cannot shake the impression that some have shown a certain honor [in publicly acknowledging and describing their actions] since committing them. And I must confess that in a few I could see myself.”
Conroy, who is tall and fit and personable, if perhaps also somewhat intense, says he met with Moore-King in Zimbabwe in 1990 and, a short time later, had an interview with Jim Auld in Northern Ireland.
Auld was one of 14 Northern Irish men picked up, apparently at random, by the British in 1971 as guinea pigs in an experiment in the use of the “five techniques,” a sequence of tortures that included hooding the subject, bombarding him with noise, depriving him of food, depriving him of sleep and forcing him to stand in an excruciating posture for hours at a time.
With Auld, Conroy mentioned that he had recently interviewed Moore-King, a torturer in Africa like the ones who inflicted so much pain on Auld and his 13 fellow victims.
“I said something to the effect that Moore-King wasn’t a monster, that he seemed like a nice guy.
“And Auld said to me something like: `Sure, he seemed like a nice guy. You didn’t see the guy [he tortured] crawling on the ground, writhing in pain. You didn’t see the guy mess his pants. You didn’t see the guy go crazy. You didn’t see the guy afterwards.'”
Conroy pauses.
The tape of the memory of Auld’s words runs again through his mind. And he says, “Even when I think of it now, it doesn’t feel very good.” He is heartily sorry — sorry for having brought pain to Auld, sorry for seeming to have failed to understand Auld’s experience at the hands of his torturers. And Conroy says Auld was right: “I don’t think Moore-King identified with the guy writhing on the ground.”
Even so, Conroy cannot turn away from the facts as he found them.
“I think my comment that Moore-King seemed like a nice guy was true,” Conroy says.
“That’s what the book’s about.”
Torturers seem like nice guys.
The implications of that reality are deeply unsettling. Torturers seem “nice” because they are, for the most part, people like you and me. People like us.
“There is more than ample evidence,” Conroy writes, “that most torturers are normal people, that most of us could be the barbarian of our dreams as easily as we could be the victim, that for many perpetrators torture is a job and nothing more.”
One former Uruguayan torturer, Hugo Garcia, told Conroy: “It was an everyday matter, nothing to be ashamed of, something you just had to do. … After a couple of weeks [of training], they brought in a prisoner and the instructor said, `Now we have to torture him to get the information we need.’ It was like he was telling you that we were going for a walk.”
And Garcia said something else as well:
“We had nothing personal against the prisoners.”
A host of psychological studies, many of them described by Conroy in his book, have found that it’s easy to get “nice” people to inflict pain — for reasons as mundane as not wanting to hurt the researcher’s feelings. “Nice” people, like me and you, seem amazingly — and distressingly — willing to ignore the consequences of their actions, even when they can hear their victims scream in pain, as long as someone else seems to be responsible or in charge.
This is the point of two recent books about the Holocaust: “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust” by Daniel Jonah Goldhagen (Vintage) and “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher R. Browning (HarperPerennial). The tendency is to see Hitler and the Nazis as sociopaths solely responsible for the killing of 6 million Jews, to say nothing of millions of other minorities and homosexuals. But, as both books show, very little of the killing could have been done without the involvement of people who weren’t National Socialism fanatics — who were just “nice” people.
It’s the same with torture.
“The torturer,” says Janice Christensen, head of the Campaign against Torture for Amnesty International, “is your neighbor’s son.”
Amnesty International has high hopes that Conroy’s book will give the issue of torture a higher visibility on the political agendas of the world’s nations. Last year, the human-rights organization documented cases of torture in more than 125 nations of the world.
The United States was one of them.
As a young reporter, Conroy wrote a five-part series for Chicago magazine on the collisions of social, racial, ethnic and political differences in the South Chicago neighborhood on the Far South Side. “I liked the people on both sides,” he tells me.
His book on Northern Ireland, “Belfast Diary: War as a Way of Life” (Beacon), was published in 1988. “My Belfast book,” he says, “was an attempt to explain to American readers why a 19-year-old Catholic in Northern Ireland would pick up a gun and shoot a policeman. It’s pretty easy to say, `Those people are fanatics,’ and go about your business. But, if you read something and say, `Gee, I might do that,’ it’s different.”
An editor once said Conroy is attracted by stories of people who sin.
Conroy says, “A lot of stories I’ve written have involved moral choices. I think that stories that involve moral choices are more interesting, and I want to be known as an interesting writer.”
But there’s more, of course.
Conroy describes himself as “somebody who has been raised Catholic, wrestling with the behavior of well-meaning people and what they do in circumstances that are often not beyond their control but within their control.”
And he says, “The most corrupting thing for a journalist is human contact. Once you get to see this person as someone other than just a guy who took a $10 bribe, then it becomes more difficult to write a just-the-facts-ma’am story.
“You start to think about why he did it, and how he came to do it, and could you have done it?
“Maybe you start to think of things that you regret.”
There is a silence. We sit there, Conroy and I, without speaking.
It is a difficult journalism he practices, an involving, demanding, emotionally wrenching journalism.
And, it seems to me, an honorable one.
HOW TO DENY CHARGES OF TORTURE
In his book, John Conroy notes that democracies — in spite of, or perhaps because of, their commitment to human rights — are loath to acknowledge the existence of government-sanctioned torture. When such charges surface, there is a fairly predictable pattern to the government’s response. Conroy summarizes it this way:
Step 1: Absolute and complete denial.
Step 2: Minimization of the abuse.
Step 3: Disparagement of the victims.
Step 4: Justification of the torture on grounds that it was effective or “necessary” under the circumstances.
Step 5: Disparagement of those helping the torture victims as people providing aid to enemies of the state.
Step 6: Assertion that the torture is no longer occurring.
Step 7: Assertion that the torture was committed by “a few bad apples.”
Step 8: Assertion that the victims will “get over it” soon.
FOR A TORTURE-FREE COUNTRY . . .
Amnesty International’s 12-point program for creating a torture-free country:
Official condemnation of torture.
Imposition of limits on the ability of the government to hold arrestees incommunicado.
Prohibition of detention of arrestees in secret locations.
Safeguards during interrogation and custody, such as notifying prisoners of their rights.
Independent investigation of reports of torture.
Prohibition of the use of statements obtained under torture.
Criminal penalties for torture.
Prosecution of alleged torturers.
Clear anti-torture training for law-enforcement, judicial and government officials.
Compensation and rehabilitation for torture victims.
Intercession with other governments to eliminate torture.
International treaties and other covenants banning torture.
