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Intimidating Aim. In Guinea, a common torture is confinement in a cell too small to allow a prisoner either to stand up or lie down. "The cell they put me in was about 4 ft. by 2 ft.," testifies Soumah Abou, 46, one of Sekou Toure's victims who now lives in France. "It had a tin roof and a metal door. There was no window, only some ventilation holes. There was no light, no bed, no place to go to the bathroom. For eight days I had no food or water."
The aim of torture is virtually the same everywhere: to gain information about subversives, terrorists, opposition groups, and to intimidate would-be dissidents. A show of brutality can be a devastatingly effective way of keeping people in line. Yet in many Communist nations this is simply not necessary: the torture chamber, anti-Communists argue, is countrywide. All-powerful, ever vigilant party apparatus, supported by huge secret police forces, make opposition almost impossible; thus torture on a grand scale is superfluous.
Communist countries like China, North Korea, Cuba and others nevertheless have their networks of "labor reform" camps for "re-educating" dissidents. The harsh life of these camps, with their meager diets, minimum time for sleep and long hours of labor, can produce agony bordering on torture.
Among Communist states that use torture, the Soviet Union is probably the worst offender. A common method of dealing with dissidents is to declare them insane and lock them away for years in mental hospitals, like the notorious Serbsky Institute in Moscow. There low-calorie diets and drug treatments produce pain and suffering as acute as more physical methods of repression. One dissenter, Cybernetics Specialist Leonid Plyushch, now living in Paris, testified that he was kept in the Dnepropetrovsk Special Hospital for 30 months after getting a spurious diagnosis of "torpid schizophrenia" with "reform-making illusions." Plyushch saw beatings applied to other patients. He himself received insulin and heavy doses of sulfur which caused "discomfort so intense that all you could do was endlessly search for a new position."
How do nations justify torture? The most common argument is that the practice is an unfortunate but indispensable means of combatting lawless elements that threaten the security of the state, especially terrorist extremists. The argument draws some support from the reckless brutality of recent terrorist movements and from the massive Communist threat—at least as it is perceived in many countries. "Nobody wants to be called a torturer," says one senior Argentine officer. "The word stinks of cowardice. But nobody ever gave away important information because a gentleman came up to him and said: 'Please tell me what you know.' "
The argument justifying torture as a necessary evil is dangerous and flawed. The fact is that the purpose of torture, more often than not, is pure and simple repression of all opposition. Moreover, once torture is sanctioned, even against genuine terrorists, the network of torture has a way of becoming a Frankenstein's monster, finding reasons for a continued existence even after its initial tasks have been accomplished.