The Most Dangerous Thing about Torture, Its Acceptance

By Eddie Griffin

Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Black Panthers in prison protested the condition of their confinement during the Revolution. They complained to the courts that their condition of confinement amounted to Cruel and Unusual Punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

The courts did not always see it as we saw it, and our access to the courts was limited. Having exhausted our avenues of justice in the states, we took our case to the world bodies, namely the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, World Peace Council, and Amnesty International.

We claimed that the government’s mind control experiments conducted on us by the CIA amounted to torture.

So began the big international debate about human rights and torture. The American public had been made to believe that the Communist Russians and Chinese used torture techniques. But that we, in the United States, were more humane. The Panthers, in turn, showed that the U.S. government adopted the same techniques and applied them on political dissents in the state, like the Panthers, Muslims, and Puerto Ricans Nationalists. The designed intent, we proved, was to “break men’s minds”.

Hence I wrote, “Breaking Men’s Minds”, as a dissertation of the U.S. government torture techniques, disguised as therapeutic behavior modification. The Russians were the first to see it as a propaganda opportunity. Having been condemned in the international community for human rights violation, during the 1970s, two Soviet dissidents won international acclaim. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn won the 1970 Nobel Prize in Literature for his prison writings: “The Gulag Archipelago” and “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich”. Another Soviet dissident, Andrei Sakharov won 1975 Nobel Peace Prize.

President Jimmy Carter had made a big issue about the Soviets violations of Human Rights. The Soviets retaliated with the story of political dissidents, like the Black Panthers, in U.S. prison.

We, thus, became part of the debate in the United Nations over the definition of Torture. It is a word that describes a practice that is impossible to measure. Torture meant more than the inflicted of pain as a means of punishment. The level of pain inflicted upon a subject was determined by the level of public acceptance. Specifically, Torture was literally defined as an act that outraged public consciousness.

Our problem was public awareness. How could the public know if we were being tortured, if the Nixon administration kept all the information secret and hidden? And besides, the public had always given the government the benefit of the doubt, believing that the American ideals were so high that we could not possibly torture anyone, let alone our fellow Americans. But the 1976 Church Commission revealed dirty secrets about the Nixion administration of govenmental powers.

We had to establish that Sleep Deprivation was torture. It was the intentional act of depriving a prisoner of his sleep, until he was broken or driven insane. Prison guards would bang on the bars and tap a man’s foot, in order to wake him up, every hour on the hour.

We protested the use of deprivation chambers where men were encased in a concrete and steel mausoleum, cut off from sensory input and the electro-magnetic field of the earth.

We complained about experimental drugs being secreted into our food and water supply, valium, librium, and potassium nitrate otherwise known as "saltpetre". For our own good, they claimed, but without our permission.

During this period of time, I did a lot of prison interviews with the outside media. My first editorial appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and I was later featured on the cover of the Sun Times quoted as say, “I will not compromise my views.” I was in the Control Unit at that time when a Soviet reporter by the name of Ilong Andronov from Literaturnaya Gazeta came to interview me.

What was Literaturnaya Gazeta? I asked. It was the Soviet Union’s equivalent of Time magazine.

Because of my isolation, I only caught a whiff of the international torture debate. But I remember waiting for an opinion from the international community. Were we the victims of U.S. torture? Were we “political prisoners”?

As I have researched past records, I see traces of the debate being reincarnated by Dick Cheney. What astonishes me most is the same argument made by the Nixon administration: If we say it is not torture, it is not torture; therefore, it is legal.

POST NOTE:
The U.S government fought against using the term "political prisoners" with the name of the Black Panthers, although Andrew Young admitted to the United Nations that the United States had political prisoners locked up.

The Carter administration did consent to the use of "Prisoner of Conscious". In 1977, the World Peace Council convened at the University of Helsinki in Finland and listed about 125 names of prisoners of conscious worldwide.

On the list was the name of Nelson Mandela (South Africa), Rafael Cancel Miranda (Puerto Rican Nationalist), Lorenzo Koemboa Irvin (Black Panther Party), Leonard Peltier (American Indian Movement), Wilmington 10, and others, including Eddie Griffin.