Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture.

John Conroy's Unspeakable Acts, Ordinary People: The Dynamics of Torture (Knopf, 2000) manages to comprehend a phenomenon many of us find incomprehensible. And it ends up revealing that torture is horrifyingly common.

"When most people imagine torture, they imagine themselves the victim," he writes. "The perpetrator appears as a monster--someone inhuman, uncivilized, a sadist, most likely male, foreign in accent, diabolical in manner. Yet there is more than ample evidence 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."

Conroy became acquainted with this topic while covering a notorious case of police brutality for the Chicago Reader. Andrew Wilson, in prison for having killed two police officers in 1982, claimed that, during his stay at the Area 2 police department on Chicago's South Side, he had been burned with both a cigarette and a radiator, suffocated when police officers put a plastic bag over his head, and electroshocked on his fingers, genitals, ears, and nose. But the story was bigger than Wilson's case alone. Michael Goldston, a police investigator cited by Conroy, found fifty cases of alleged abuse between 1973 and 1986. According to Goldston, "The type of abuse described was not limited to the usual beating, but went into such esoteric areas as psychological techniques and planned torture.... Particular command members were aware of the systematic abuse and perpetuated it either by actively participating in same or failing to take any action to bring it to an end."

In addition to the Chicago case, Conroy's new book examines the torture of Republican sympathizers in Northern Ireland and the torture of Palestinian detainees in Israel. He attempts to discover how ordinary people become torturers, how seemingly free societies come to condone and protect such abuse, who the victims are, how they respond, and how otherwise concerned citizens become bystanders who know what is happening and do not act.

Although Conroy mentions totalitarian states, he is much more interested in the appearance of torture in countries like the United States, which is commonly thought of as free from that kind of thing. "When I embarked on this project, when I was still unsure as to what form the manuscript would take, dozens of people asked me if I was going to visit various nations well-known for their use of torture," Conroy writes. "It seemed to me that many of these well-meaning men and women had the idea that torture was something done in some backward civilization by the barely human and certainly ignorant. I was gradually becoming aware, however, that torture is something that most of us are capable of, and so I decided to use case studies that I thought American readers could identify with--`people like us' who deployed the brutal methods I'd heard associated with the Third World."

I admire this book for many reasons, including its extensive research. Conroy spent ten years on his project and managed to persuade numerous torturers, superiors who ordered the torture, and victims to speak with him at length. These segments are tempered by theoretical chapters that explore the history and sociology of torture and examine psychological studies of victims and bystanders.

I am also impressed with Conroy's intellectual honesty and unflinching humanity. He does not turn from a complicated perception of torture--one that allows for moments of identification with the perpetrators but never loses sight of a moral center. Conroy's writing is always cognizant of the brutal acts these men and women have committed and the effect that torture has on the victims' lives. He wants to understand how torture happens, and his curiosity drives this disturbing book.

Anne-Marie Cusac is Managing Editor of The Progressive.