ABSTRACT
Those of us who grew up on a diet of American movies circa 1930-1960 are apt to think of torture as a means of forcible extraction of confessions from the bad guys or of information from the good guys-an inexcusable naiveté in today’s world. Torture is a global reality employed as a political tool in more than 100 countries to systematically break the spirit and destroy the very identity and personality of its victims. It renders them docile and unable to resist or react to authoritarian or totalitarian desecration of human rights and human dignity. 1
Encyclopedia Britannica 2 defines torture as:
[T]he infliction of excruciating physical or physiological pain for such reasons as punishment, intimidation, coercion, the extraction of a confession, or the obtainment of information. Throughout history, governments have used torture against their enemies and as a part of the legal systems… Modes of inflictive pain range from physical devices to chemical injections to elaborate psychological techniques designed not only to break down resistance but to subvert personality… The modern techniques of torture include not only the traditional methods of physical pain but also the use of complex psychological and pharmacological methods that had been developed out of studies of medical research and the psychology of pain.
