Silent reminders.

Yesterday I opened a bag of cinnamon-coated pecans, put a few into my mouth, and began enjoying their distinct taste. Suddenly I was flooded with memories from almost twenty years ago--memories of gathering pecans under a tree in my grandmother's garden on the kibbutz where she lives.

That a simple object like a pecan can bring back sensations from my past is not a feature unique to my psyche. In his book Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust tells his readers that often the past is hidden "beyond the reach of intellect, in some material object (in the sensation which that material object will give us) which we do not suspect." And indeed, an accidental sensory encounter with an object--be it some kind of food, clothing, or show on television--can awaken memories from the past.

Marcel Proust is not the only one conscious of this remarkable dimension of the human psyche. The people who practice torture in Argentina, Turkey, Iraq, Indonesia, and the other seventy three countries targeted by Amnesty International because of torture are also well aware of it.

Have you ever asked yourself why torturers use cigarettes to burn their victims or shoes to hit them? Why, when raping women or connecting electrodes to men's testicles, do torturers have a radio playing in the background?

Torturers know that the objects they use will continue to haunt their victims. Perhaps while sitting in a coffeehouse talking to friends, someone will light a cigarette, triggering harrowing memories from the interrogation room. Or maybe while driving a car, the voice of a radio broadcaster will cause a victim of torture to flashback to the horrendous violations he or she had experienced. It is not by chance but precisely for this reason that torturers use everyday objects; they know their victims will re-encounter those objects outside the prison walls. Dr. Pierre Duterte, who wrote The Body's Memory, points out that the victim's body is also an object that brings back memories of torture:

Not being able to endure the

sight of your own naked body in

a mirror, because of memories of

forced stripping in front of

laughing torturers. Not being able

to stare into the mirror which

endlessly reflects the image of

your body forever marked by the

imprint of barbarity. That's what 

your body can be, your own

image transformed in the

representation of torture.... Every

time you notice that you cannot

hear someone talking on the side

where your ear has been

destroyed by beating, you return

to your Iranian prison cell. When

this happens countless times

every day, you end up preferring

to be alone.

So why is torture used? What goals does this monstrous practice attempt to achieve? The prevailing conception--propagated by 60 Minutes in one of its recent programs dedicated to torture--is that torture is used in order to extract information from enemies or members of insurgent groups.

For example, on November 14, 1996, the Israeli Supreme Court lifted an interim injunction that prevented interrogators from using physical force. According to Human Rights Watch, the court's ruling was based upon the govern meet's contention that there was a well founded suspicion that the defendant "possesses extremely vital information, the immediate procurement of which would help save human lives and prevent serious terrorist attacks in Israel, and that there is a real concern that these are to be carried out in the near future." The government invoked the so called ticking bomb scenario to justify the practice of torture, and the Israeli Supreme Court approved its use.

One should remember that, unlike Israel, totalitarian countries which practice torture rarely need to provide an excuse to justify their inhuman action. Yet when they do offer some sort of justification, it runs along the same lines: "There is hidden information that the {government} needs to know"

The fact of the matter is, however, that the opposite is closer to the truth. The major reason behind the use of torture is to silence and control. When Galileo proved the motion of the earth, he was declared a heretic by an assembly of cardinals, hauled before the Inquisition, and compelled to recant under pain of torture. The church was determined to stifle any view that threatened its orthodoxy, its order.

Yet torture is not only about controlling the victim, who more often than not will be,unable to speak out for the rest of his or her life; it is also about controlling the population as a whole. As an imminent threat, torture is used to intimidate groups or individuals--from peasants in Mexico and protesters in apartheid South Africa to the Islamic front in Algeria--who oppose the existing order within the country in which they reside. When one analyzes the history of the use of torture, where it was practiced and why, one will see that torture is not simply about inducing a person to speak. Rather, it is about silence--ensuring that particular activists are broken and popular opposition remains suppressed.

Neve Gordon is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Government at the University of Notre Dame and the co-editor of the book Torture, published by Zed Books, London.