REVIEWS

...Alva Hart says she simply did not know what was going on during the 1980s...

...intelligence officers, she details the multifaceted statutes, national and international, under which torturers and the “intellectual authors” of torture can, and should, be brought to justice...

...By the late 1980s, the United Nations recorded that Peru had the most forced disappearances in the world, as international bodies denounced torture and Fujimori’s military tribunals...

...About the Author Christy Thornton is NACLA's director...

...the torturer is to be lauded for his resolve in obtaining the necessary information by privileging the lives of the innocent masses over that of the bomber...

...Indeed, torture has been part of “the American Way” for at least half a century—a fact that will remain a source of comfort to its practitioners worldwide for the foreseeable future, unless we choose to fight for its eradication within the ranks of our own government first...

...These are some of the extraordinary and disturbing moments captured in State of Fear, a compelling documentary that draws on the extensive 2003 report of Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission to explore the causes and consequences of Peru’s internal war...

...that the explosive would not be moved or the operation changed once the suspect was captured), examining the usefulness of information obtained under torture, and then, like Ignatieff, turning to the question of the conscientious offender...

...And so, the scenario has it, he is tortured, reveals the location of the bomb, and the government is able to avert a disaster and save countless lives...

...Truth, Torture and the American Way: The History and Consequences of U.S...

...While this is partly true, it is also true that the armed forces, which have always played a significant role in Peruvian politics, gained inordinate power in the war against Shining Path, and important sectors within its ranks were interested in maintaining this power at all costs...

...His captors—military, police, intelligence agents, government officials—reason that the only means for extracting information from him is torture...

...government personnel and intelligence officials, particularly in the CIA, have been refining and using for decades the torture techniques revealed in the Abu Ghraib photographs...

...it was a war that too few cared about...

...It establishes from the beginning that Shining Path was not a popular revolutionary movement in the mold of the Sandinistas or El Salvador’s FMLN, but rather an organization that often used fear and intimidation to compel support for its armed struggle...

...A significant portion of Harbury’s book is dedicated to the experiences of a handful of Central Americans who were detained, disappeared, tortured and killed by U.S.-backed military regimes, including her personal experiences in Guatemala, where her husband was disappeared and murdered in 1992 (the subject of her previous book Searching for Everardo...

...The film brings together a powerful array of testimonies from survivors of state and Shining Path violence, as well as from activists and academics, to tell the story of Peru’s harrowing experience of violence, abuse and indifference...

...First, it portrays the military as almost a pawn of civilian politicians, who put them in charge because they don’t know what else to do...

...This was not a war that was unknown...

...An eight-year-old boy facing a deadly choice—join the guerrilla army or be killed—soon learns to enjoy killing the enemy he has been indoctrinated to hate...

...prisoners...

...It also documents the army’s use of terror to suppress Shining Path, and later the use of the “War against Terror” by the government of Alberto Fujimori to solidify a dictatorial regime and eliminate all adversaries...

...State of Fear brings together powerful visual images of Peru’s internal conflict, the suffering of its people, the horror of war itself...

...It is perhaps true that the highly segmented and racist nature of Peruvian society may have shielded some sectors from knowing the full dimensions of what was occurring in the highlands...

...A young woman describes guerrilla visits to her village as they seek support for their revolutionary war, finally murdering her grandfather and torching her grandmother’s home to the ground, with her inside...

...The book takes an explicit “human rights perspective,” and broadly surveys both the history of torture, from Ancient Greece to the post-9/11 United States, and its incidence around the world, from Brazil to Uzbekistan, Egypt to China...

...Can we possibly believe that the “road to Abu Ghraib,” as Reed Brody examines it, began where the Twin Towers fell...

...Hence the civil-military alliance that solidified under Fujimori’s tenure, which granted the military the powers it sought while also guaranteeing immunity from prosecution in human rights cases...

...The scenario is the classic justification of the “necessary evil” of torture...

...But the film tries too hard to convince us that Alva Hart, with her apologies to survivors of the violence, is the face of reconciliation in Peru...

...Harbury spends more time with the “ticking bomb” scenario, detailing its assumptions (that the individual captured actually has “actionable” intelligence...

...One particularly fascinating essay, by documentary filmmaker Marie-Monique Robin, reviews the history of torture in cases of counterinsurgency, detailing the process by which torture techniques have been taught by one government to another, with French security officers in Indochina and later Algeria becoming professors of torture tactics for Latin American military students—tactics that continue to surface around the world when details of abuses see the light of the press or the courts...

...That is, until it hit Lima, at which point upper-class limeños like Alva Hart responded unflinchingly: forget human rights, kill the terrorists...

...Much more common among the elite than the teary apologies of Alva Hart, such views reveal the long road ahead to true societal reconciliation in postwar Peru...

...Perhaps her repentance is sincere, but the filmmakers do not even hint that there are powerful sectors—among them the political elite, the business class and the military—that reject the truth commission’s findings, hold fast to a policy of denial and seek to derail the process that is the Commission’s ultimate mission: achieving reconciliation through not only truth but also justice...

...A young woman on her way to enroll in college is detained by the military, tortured to give up information she does not possess about student leaders, and after subsequent rapes and a sham military trial, is sentenced to 20 years in jail...

...Involvement in Torture by Jennifer K. Harbury, 2005, Beacon Press, 227 pages, $14.00 Paperback...

...The answer, she says, is that it already does...

...But Harbury is searching for a pattern, and after years of poring through files and listening to the miserable testimony of torture survivors, she finds evidence of direct CIA involvement in and support of torture-by-proxy in dozens of cases, including that of her husband...

...The film perpetuates a few myths of its own, however...

...But are we to believe, then, that U.S...

...It follows, then, that any absolute ban on, and thus criminalization of, torture, is morally bankrupt...

...Perhaps more importantly, however, she also examines the obstacles preventing such justice, not least among them the Administration’s machinations to create for itself veritable immunity from prosecution, as with the appointment of Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General and Vice President Dick Cheney’s recent move to have the CIA exempted from pending legislation banning torture of U.S...

...She draws disturbing parallels between methods used in Central America—and certainly before in Algeria, Vietnam and Argentina—and those exposed in Iraq and Afghanistan: whereas torture victims knew all too well the “submarino” in Latin America’s Dirty Wars, we have the “water-boarding” of detainees in Afghanistan...

...About the Author Jo-Marie Burt is an assistant professor of politics at George Mason University...

...This view is reiterated throughout the film by Beatriz Alva Hart, a lawyer turned Fujimorista legislator and later appointed to the Truth Commission...

...This is precisely the question that motivates Jennifer Harbury...

...Any cursory history of the use and justification of torture will place at the center of the torture debate the so-called “ticking bomb” scenario: under imminent threat of a serious explosion likely to injure and kill scores of civilians, a government is able to apprehend one of the bombing’s masterminds in the eleventh hour...

...The narrative she undertakes details the way in which U.S...

...State of Fear, a film by Pamela Yates, Paco De Onís and Peter Kinoy, USA/Peru, 2004, 94 minutes...

...Another myth is that no one knew about the magnitude of the atrocities being committed by both Shining Path and the Peruvian security forces...

...These appalling stories of repression, especially when taken together with the personal accounts of torture in the Dirty Wars of the Southern Cone offered in the Human Rights Watch volume, are exhausting in their brutality...

...Peru’s was a war in which tens of thousands of innocents—mostly poor, rural, indigenous Peruvians—were caught in the crossfire, victimized because they, the civilian population, were the terrain upon which each side sought to construct its victory...

...To be sure, in the final section of the book, on “Torture and the United States,” we are given a blow-by-blow account of the systematic way in which the current U.S...

...As others point out, however, there are few judicial regimes that would punish such a conscientious offender, even after forcing him to stand trial—as shown by the Israeli Supreme Court in a 1999 case that reversed the Landau Commission’s official sanction of torture...

...The Roth and Worden volume, a project of Human Rights Watch, attempts to answer this question...

...In addition to the startling evidence Harbury presents for the involvement in torture of U.S...

...By not engaging in a serious discussion of the relationship between civilian and military power, the film fails to seriously address one of the central—and ongoing—problems of Peruvian politics...

...He refuses to reveal any intelligence that might save the lives of innocent victims, such as the location of the eponymous “ticking bomb...

...This history is crucial for understanding the current debate, but it does not explain how we find ourselves, some half a century after the initial development of the Geneva Conventions, audience to a protracted legislative and philosophical debate on the merits of torture...

...Another myth the film effectively shatters is one perpetuated by Fujimori and his allies in the Peruvian armed forces: that it was their heavy-handed tactics, dating from the 1992 self-coup, that led to the strategic defeat of Shining Path...

...whereas families and human rights activists looked for traces of the “desaparecidos” of South and Central America, lawyers today search in vain for the locations of “ghost prisoners” of the U.S...

...Yet human rights activists and progressive journalists were reporting on army massacres in that region since the early 1980s...

...until his own brother is executed on the orders of his comrades for desertion...

...But Harbury is rooted deeply enough in the history of U.S...

...administration has redefined, renounced or simply ignored decades of universal condemnation and legal proscription of torture...

...government...

...The film does an impressive job of dispelling some lingering myths about Peru’s internal conflict...

...that he would reveal his information in time for the bomb to be stopped...

...It was not repression but careful police work that defeated terror in Peru—an important note for those who claim to be fighting terror worldwide...

...In Roth and Worden, Michael Ignatieff admits the moral hazard presented by the scenario: an absolute ban on torture forces an interrogator, in the case of the ticking bomb, to become a conscientious offender in choosing to ignore the ban and obtain the necessary intelligence through torture...

...involvement in torture began when the Bush Administration declared the War on Terror outside the realm of the Geneva Conventions...

...In both Roth and Worden’s collection of essays and Jennifer Harbury’s impassioned survey, the “ticking bomb” scenario is examined thoroughly...

...sanction of and involvement in torture that she refuses to believe that a simple change of administration will solve the problem...

...State of Fear documents the old-fashioned detective work carried out by a specialized police unit that led to the “capture of the century”—the September 1992 arrest of Abimael Guzmán—that effectively destroyed the seemingly invincible Shining Path...

...So, why then, when there are myriad legal frameworks prohibiting torture on the national and international levels, do we still find ourselves ensconced in this debate...

...Where the threat can be shown to be genuine,” Ignatieff argues, punishment for the torturer who saved scores of lives is unlikely...

...If the bomb is about to go off,” she asks, “shouldn’t our legal system allow our agents to do whatever they can...