A Liberal in Trumpistan: Trump is Right! Torture Works!

As a retired history teacher, I sometimes find President Donald J. Trump’s statements chilling. There is, for example, his stated willingness to send U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism to Guantanamo to stand military trial.

Still, in all fairness, I should support him whenever he might be correct. He insists torture works.

History proves it does. In fact, history shows that when it comes to torture, Mr. Trump’s ideas are just weak tea. If we’re going to torture, shouldn't we do it right? Let’s Make America Great Again.

Let’s bring back the rack.

Many Trump supporters are white Evangelical Christians. So let’s start our lesson there. When Rome blazed up in A. D. 64 and Nero fiddled a cheerful tune it proved easy to load all blame on a despised religious minority. Nero set out to torture and kill as many followers of Jesus as he could find. The Roman historian Tacitus, no fan of Christianity himself, was nevertheless shocked by Nero’s cruelty. Executing prisoners was no “fun.” Nero loved to watch them suffer. Tacitus explained:

A sport was made of their execution. Some, sewn into the skins of animals, were torn apart by dogs. Others were crucified or burned, and still others, as darkness drew on, were used as torches. Nero devoted his gardens to the spectacle, provided a circus, and himself, in the costume of a charioteer, rode around among the crowd, until compassion began to arise for the victims, who though deserving of the severest penalties were actually suffering not for the public good but to glut the cruelty of one man.

Torture remained in fashion for many centuries to come. I mean: why mess with what works so well, right? The English tortured with great enthusiasm in the time of Henry VIII. When Alexander Leighton questioned the new Anglican dogma he paid a horrible price. The courts ordered him whipped, fined, and sent to the pillory. One ear was sliced off and his nostrils were split with a special device inserted up the nose. He was branded on the forehead with an “H,” for heretic. “At some convenient later time,” the judge ordered, Leighton was to be whipped again. Then his other ear would be cut off and he would serve life in prison. Torture worked so well it drove the Pilgrims out of England.

The Puritans, a group that understood the virtues of nose-splitting and lopped off ears—when not applied to themselves—followed the Pilgrims to these shores in 1630. The foundation of their law was the Bible and the only interpretation accepted was their own. Those who questioned Puritan ideas might have their tongues bored with red-hot irons. Obadiah Holmes, an Anabaptist, earned even worse punishment when he refused to baptize his young children, as Puritan church leaders insisted he must. Holmes was sentenced to be struck thirty times with a three-corded whip, the same punishment as for rape. Sometimes the Puritans whipped or hung Quakers too.

In the fullness of time the Roman Catholic Church also applied the bludgeon and the torch to encourage the recalcitrant to talk.

Members of the Inquisition perfected the use of thumb screws to force suspects to confess, and, as a bonus, reveal the names of co-conspirators, even if none existed. Such screws were powerful vices designed to crush the ends of all ten digits, one by one, if required. A prisoner could be stretched on a rack and a set of ropes cranked till arms and legs came out of joint. Those who confessed to various forms of heresy were burned at the stake.

Also: witchcraft! In the good old days all the best methods for ferreting out those who practiced the dark arts involved torture. During the Salem Witch Trials, confessions (and we do expect people to confess if we’re going to torture) were effectively elicited from dozens of suspected witches. Only Giles Cory proved resistant to the powers of logic. Cory was staked to the ground. A large rock was placed upon his chest. “Are you a witch?” Massachusetts authorities wondered. Cory refused to say. Another rock. Same question. Cory remained mute. More rocks. The query repeated. Finally the weight so compressed Cory’s chest that his ribs cracked and he suffocated and died.

Presto: One less witch!

Call me a skeptic, but for some reason I get the feeling President Trump doesn’t read much history and may not have glanced at the U. S. Constitution in years. (See Amendments IV, V, VI, VII and VIII.) Still, if he insists torture works, who am I, a humble liberal citizen, to disagree?

In fact, let’s go full Gestapo! Those boys knew how to make pain work for the Nazi regime. Consider the case of a Polish partisan who refused to reveal the location of a hidden camp. His skull was crushed and his legs broken to make him talk. Finally, his body was dumped in a wood coffin and sent to the ovens to be burned. At the last minute, he regained consciousness and screamed, “Open up! Open up! I am still alive!”

Every self-respecting Nazi knew torture worked. Sometimes they tied prisoners’ hands behind their backs. Then they ran a rope round the prisoners’ wrists and dangled them from trees. One victim was hung up because guards wanted him to reveal the names of other inmates involved in forbidden activities. An eyewitness explained what happened next: “[H]e would have talked, but he does not know them [the names]. His hands are tied behind his back and he is hung from a pulley by his wrists. After a few seconds his arms come out of their sockets and remain twisted upward, vertical behind his back.” A 19-year-old Czech prisoner refused to break despite hideous abuse. The boy’s mother was in custody; but unknown to her son she had committed suicide to end her misery. Gestapo agents cut off her head and brought it to the young man’s cell to break his will.

At last he talked.

Remember that happy day when Candidate Trump insisted Saddam Hussein was good at dealing with terrorists? Well, Saddam was very good. He declared all Kurdish people terrorists. In 1988 he ordered poison gas dropped on dozens of villages. Estimates place the death toll at 50,000. That’s how you kill terrorists, including toddler terrorists. Also terrorist babies who can’t talk—even if you do bring the pain. As for Saddam’s critics, the body of one dissident who died in police custody was returned to his family. Nine nails had been pounded into his flesh. An eye had been gouged out.

His penis had been cut off.

Does torture work? Raping prisoners, male and female, often makes them talk. Mock executions are fun for all. You can include rats in the process, in homage to George Orwell. (Sales of 1984 have recently spiked.) You can stick a bicycle spoke in a prisoner’s eye and douse the wound with acid. Another neat trick to spur a little prisoner-to-guard conversation: Take suspects up in a helicopter and pose questions. Prisoner #1 claims not to know the answers. Out the door he or she goes!

Prisoner #2, do you have anything to offer?

In the end, President Trump is right, as the Nazis were right, as ISIS is right in its sick, twisted “radical Islamic terrorist” methods. (See, I even used conservatives’ favorite phrase!)

Torture induces terror.

Terror cows, at least for a time, entire populations.

Don’t believe me? Read what Amnesty International has to say. A sixteen-year-old in Nigeria is suspected of burglary. Police beat him, shoot him in one hand and hang him by his limbs for hours. The kid admits he did it! A Mexican woman is suspected of being involved with the drug cartels. Drag her off to jail and administer electric shocks to the most sensitive parts of the female anatomy. Wrap her in plastic to disguise any marks of a beating, and kick and cuff her till she spills some extra-judicial beans. She will soon sign a confession without bothering to read it. “If they had not tortured me, I would not have signed the statement,” she later told Amnesty International.

Well, too bad for her!

Don’t get me wrong. I loathe ISIS, in large degree because they’re such a savage crew. The sooner they are stamped out the better.

But I wonder how far this kind of torture regimen might go. If it works on foreigners, and U. S. citizens suspected of terrorism, couldn’t we put an end to murder and rape and…oh, maybe even criticism of the U. S. government by bringing back the thumbscrews?

What better way to prove the superiority of American values than to inflict hideous suffering on other human beings.

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Also: think of the fun when some of the victims turn out to be innocent. (See comments by GOP Senator Rand Paul.)

Also opposed to torture: General James “Mad Dog” Mattis, President Trump’s own Secretary of Defense.

Also against: John McCain (Trump: that guy is no hero), the only victim of torture serving in the U. S. Senate.