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Technological Invention and Diffusion of Torture Equipment Darius M. Rejali
Presented at the International Sociological
Copyright (c) 1998 by Darius Rejali, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S. copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed in electronic form, provided that the author is notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the author at rejali@reed.edu
Introduction The goal of this paper is to sketch the story of electric torture instruments in the first half of the twentieth century. It is part of a much larger project that reconstructs the history of electric instruments used in the course of ordinary police work, for arrest to interrogation, throughout the world. These instruments include tasers, stun guns, shocksticks, cattle prods, picanas, dynamos and magnetos, and Electric Convulsive Therapy devices. This paper is my preliminary report. But before I proceed to the main story, I want to explain why it is important to undertake such a study. It is important, first, because while we know a great deal about the politics of torture, we know very little about the technology of torture and we are uncertain as to how to account for similarities and differences in torture practices in different countries. Previous explanations for similarities in torture techniques have posited a Universal Distributor Nation (Chomsky, School for Assassins) or proposed spontaneous local innovation. But we will get no closer to the answer unless we map the distribution of a particular technology. This study sheds light on the problem of how electric torture technologies diffused across time and space. It clarifies the similarities and differences in the way different police forces torture, particularly similarities in techniques and technologies. In this context, electric torture instruments has an advantage not afforded to many other kinds of torture since it is easily recognized in different accounts, its variations are identifiable, and its proximate origin, the invention of electricity, provides a manageable field of time and space across which to map it. More broadly the larger project contributes to the sociology of technology. It will examine and evaluate different accounts of technology innovation and diffusion in light of the evidence, but that, for the moment is beyond the scope of this paper. The choice of electric torture instruments is important for another reason. In the 1990s, electric instruments are completely ubiquitous while they once were extremely rare. Such instruments are mass manufactured and accepted as a part of routine police work. For example, when L.A. police beat Rodney King in 1992, a King was electrified by taser 3 times receiving thousands of volts but press reports did not focus on this aspect of police brutality and it is now all but forgotten. Even so, such electrical technology has been implicated in torture throughout the world, as a recent Amnesty International report documents. From a human rights policy perspective, there are good political reasons to examine how and why these methods circulate. Finally, despite the ubiquitousness of tasers and stunguns today, we cannot say that public resistance to the use of such instruments has disappeared and this brings me to a third reason. Electric torture has become ubiquitous despite obvious popular horror of this technology, and explaining this disjuncture is extremely puzzling. In the Stallone movies, in "Brazil", not to mention the experiments of Milgram, when people want to invoke man's inhumanity to man, they do it through electricity. Electric torture defines modern torture in the popular imagination. Thus, we have the odd spectacle of electric instruments being condemned in popular thought and culture, and yet commonly accepted part of everyday police reality. To explain this puzzle of popular condemnation and everyday acceptance, we need to reconsider the myth of the origin of electric torture, and cast it in its proper light. Long before Hollywood, writers created a genealogy of electric torture that allowed on the one hand for people to condemn electric torture and, on the other hand, to see the new kinds of electric torture instruments, as completely different and acceptable forms of policing. Debunking this myth is as important as mapping the history of these instruments. Imagined Stories: The Dual Origin Myth What is the imagined story of the origin and diffusion of electric torture? There are in fact two stories. The first story is the story of how electric torture was invented by the Nazi Gestapo, passed on to French troops in the Algerian war, to Argentina through Nazi refugees, and to the US CIA, which explored electric torture technology during the Cold War. From there, electric torture technology found its way into the police forces of the rest of the world. The second story is the story of how tasers and stun guns were invented. This story, which can be reconstructed out of patent searches, posits a steady accretion of technological innovation from the turn of the century to the present, in which different inventors and tinkerers created various devices for the convenience of mankind (cattleprods, electric chairs, tasers, & stun guns). It's worth remarking on the contrast between these two stories. The first story, what I shall call, the humanist story, find the origin of electric torture in a moment of unreason and evil, and sees its subsequent distribution as a matter of accident and self-interest. The second story, which I shall call, the natural story, finds the origin of electric torture in reason, and sees the development of tasers and stun guns as part of the natural inevitable march of technology. The natural story thus culminates in a range of 'acceptable' torture devices such as tasers and stun guns to be found in our everyday life while the humanist story leads to the movies of Sylvester Stallone and the popular condemnation of electric torture today. It is this 'dual origin' myth of electric torture that allows ordinary people to, on the one hand, condemn the diffusion of electric torture instruments and on the other hand tolerate its everyday use in their communities. And what is especially important, whenever a device is recast from one story into another, this has the effect of delegitimizing or relegitimizing its use. To describe the "dual origin" myth of electric torture is to also introduce you to the challenge of reconstructing the history of electric torture since clearly the history of electric torture involves both history and technology, self-interest and reason, accident and necessity, nature and society, and the two narratives that seem so nicely separate, are in fact deeply interlinked. Like every myth, there are elements of truth to the imagined stories of electric torture, and I want to acknowledge these before I give my own story. The natural story of electric torture is correct to identify a steady stream of technological innovation throughout the twentieth century, but it can't explain why certain innovations were linked together in particular ways or how they were distributed. The humanist story is correct in saying that electric torture was used in the Algerian war by the French, that the CIA did invest in ECT during the Korean War, and that Argentine police did use electric torture in the post war period. This story however gets the origin wrong; electric torture predates the Gestapo. Nor is there evidence that German Gestapo officers ever used electric torture, although electric torture did occur in World War II but under very particular circumstances and in the hands of very particular actors. The mythic story gets the main actors wrong, can't explain how electric torture spreads from axis to allies, doesn't explain subsequent worldwide diffusion very well, and it can't account for particular independent innovations in this field in different police forces. Now let me turn to my story. While its broad arc is clear, I confess that there are some parts that are still puzzling to me, and I will note them as I go along. In telling this story, I won't always try to explain the causal connections, but rather show what we can confirm about the main actors, locations, innovations and changes in electric torture, and the nature of what needs to be explained. Section I: Antecedents to Electrical Torture Instruments An electrical instrument like the picana or the stun gun brings together three qualities. The instrument brings electricity to bear on an interrogation, it shocks the victim, and it does so in a manner that does not kill the victim. These three qualities raise three different questions: how did knowledge of the electrification of human bodies accumulate? how did electricity enter into the interrogation process? and how was it transformed into a process of shocking the victim? To answer these questions, we need to explore three other apparatuses: watershock tortures, the electric chair, and the use of glaring lights in interrogation. Investigating these apparatuses will provide not only preliminary answers to these questions, but also help one situate what is analytically distinctive about electrical torture instruments. Shocking Treatment Shock antedates electricity. When two bodies of armed knights clashed on the field, colliding soldiers experienced mental bewilderment. This was called "shock" and it was this notion that was used to explicate the state of survivors of railroad crashes in the nineteenth century. In its penal form in the 19th century, shocking prisoners was meant to intended to create not just bewilderment but also discipline. Take for example the introduction of cold showers into Sing Sing prison from 1848-1875:
Warden Andrews in 1853 considered the original cold shower to be a humanitarian improvement over whipping and not too different from a normal shower bath. Shock, in other words, was administered first through water. In addition to the cold water shock, there was the shock of near drowning. In 1941, a Belgian torturer in Paris invented the method of the bathtub refined the Sing Sing shield. Masuy politely questioned his victims, then had their heads held underneath water till near drowning, and then continued the investigation by offering brandy, food or cigarettes. We have then two kinds of watershock methods: one which strikes all at once leaving the victim stunned and bewildered and another that comes slowly as the victim runs out of oxygen. The victim always survives the first but may drown as a result of the second. This is a distinction that we will encounter again in the case of electric torture. There are some kinds of electric torture that are just like cold-water shocks. They deliver thousands of volts, they leave the victim stunned, but they do not kill. There is another kind of electrical shock that kills as it slowly paralyzes the muscles with a sensation akin to drowning. It will be the great challenge of electrical engineers to create devices that do not kill in this manner, although they begin the century, creating devices that do kill. Electrifying Bodies No torture interrogation is successful if the victim dies, and no electrocution is successful if the victim does not die immediately. To locate the moment where we have a takeoff in knowledge of electrification we need to locate the moment where electricity enters on a massive scale into matters of life and death. Now it is true that electrifying bodies is among the most ancient of medical techniques. Ancient Egyptians used the electrical discharge of blowfish as a healing technique. Pliny the elder wrapped electrical eels around the heads of patients as a cure for headaches. In early modern Europe, experiments using the Leyden Jar to generate electricity were popular among a salon crowd, and in the 19th century, young women placed their feet against metal plates for an electrical thrill. These events, which are often simultaneously entertainment and knowledge, indicate a certain fascination with electrical discharge. But the mass electrification of bodies has its origins in the age of mass electrification itself, and it arises in the United States around a series of economic and political struggles in the 1880s. To this day, the United States remains the only country that sanctions electrocution as a means of exercising the death penalty. New York was the first state to adopt it, electrocuting William Kemmler in 1890. At the time, critics objected, arguing that something that had given so much civilization to the world should not be associated with death, but the lower courts concluded that electricity does not violate the US Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Kemmler appealed to the Supreme Court, but the court rejected Kemmler's challenge arguing that the Eight Amendment did not apply to the state. Kemmler was electrocuted on August 7, 1890, and while the Supreme Court has subsequently reversed its position on the applicability of the Eight Amendment to the States, Kemmler v. New York is the cited authority on the acceptability of the electric chair. Beyond this approval, the electric chair had the endorsement of the inventor of the electric age itself, Thomas Edison. Edison's motives were mainly economic, not humanitarian. At the outset of the age of mass electrification, Edison and Westinghouse's corporations were locked in a critical struggle for the kind of wire that would come into your house (much as today cable and telephone are competing for the kind of wire that comes into your house). The crucial question was whether electrical instruments would be powered by alternating current or direct current. The stakes were quite high for all of Edison's machines ran on direct current whereas Westinghouse's machines ran on alternating current. Moreover, the Association of Electrical Engineers favored alternating current simply because it could travel farther on power grids. Today, as we know, the battle was settled in favor of alternating current, but the outcome was not inevitable. Alternating current had one very clearly negative feature, and that was the fact that it can kill whereas direct current does not. This is due to the amperage in alternating current. What kills in electricity is not the voltage, but the amperage. One can be shocked by 100,000 volts with minuscule amperage, as one is today by stun guns, and survive; whereas in the modern American electrocution, the electrocuted receive between 2000 and 2200 volts at an amperage of 7 to 12. Edison sought to convince homeowners that they would not want something as dangerous as alternating current in their homes and places of business. To this end, Edison secretly employed one Harry Jones to go about New York illustrating the dangers of alternating current by electrocuting dogs in public gatherings. And then fortuitously, in the mid-1880s, the New York Legislature began inquiring about the possibility of replacing hanging by a more humane technique. Lethal injection was considered, but the doctors would not participate. This left electrocution, and on this matter commercial interests were deeply involved in promoting various methods. Kemmler's 1890 challenge to the electrical chair was financed by some of the nascent electrical companies, including Westinghouse, "which were fearful of the impact of sales on state-sponsored death by electrocution." (Schabas, p. 163, cf 180) In reply, Edison testified in favor of the technique. This commercial competition has not abated since then. In more recent cases before US Courts, expert witnesses who testify on the inadequacies of the electrical chair happen to be "commercial promoters of equipment for lethal injection, a fact pointed out with regularity by prosecuting attorney's" (Schabas. p. 164) What is important for my story about the electric chair is that at the beginning of the age of mass electrification, mass electric execution became the norm. Electricity entered into the American penal process. After New York in 1890, several other states followed: Ohio in 1896, Massachusetts in 1898; New Jersey in 1907; Virginia in 1908; North Carolina in 1909, Kentucky in 1910; and Arkansas, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Nebraska in 1913; Texas (?) and Louisiana (?). It also entered popular imagination through the movies as actor after actor was sent to the chair. With the distribution of electrical machinery that executes, there also began the exploration of how much amperage it takes to kill a human being, a factor that is crucial for electric torture. The media and judicial focus on botched executions illustrates this, even though today electrocution is used only in a few states, notably Florida, replaced as it has been with lethal injection in most jurisdictions. This knowledge, as we shall see, will become pivotal in the later corporate development of electric tasers and stun guns. Criminals fear light While the United States was the only country that employed electricity in the execution of criminals, North Atlantic states more generally also employed electricity in the police and penal process. City fathers promoted electrification of neighborhoods as a crime-fighting device for as we all have been told, the criminal fears light. In Paris, in a particularly macabre move, the electrification of the morgue was promoted so that alleged murderers could confront the reality of their acts fully. And while the electrification of prisons today is considered a right by the imprisoned, if not a necessity by guards and wardens, the lighting up of criminals cells was seen as a way of forcing them to confront the fully reality of their deeds. But perhaps the most common use of electricity in the interrogatory process was the shining of a bright light in the face of the accused. We are all familiar with this picture from the movies, but here is a picture from 1961 in Vietnam: "The prisoner was forced to stand in front of, and to stare at a high-voltage electric lamp until his eyes blurred and he would faint. (Tram, 1961) Such techniques were part of third degree interrogations throughout Europe and the North America in the 1920s and 1930s. "'Work' is the term used to signify any form of what is commonly called the third degree, and may consist in nothing more than a severe cross-examination. Perhaps in most cases it is no more than that, but the prisoner knows that he is wholly at the mercy of his inquisitor and that the severe cross-examination may at any moment shift to a severe beating...Powerful lights turned full on the prisoner's face, or switched on and off have been found effective....The most commonly used method is persistent questioning, continuing hour after hour, sometimes by relays of officers. It has been known since 1500 at least that deprivation of sleep is the most effective torture and certain to produce any confession desired." (Aschcraf v. Tennessee, footnote 6, p. 150, quoted from Committee on Lawless Enforcement of the Law).Norway, p. 31) We grasp the full effect of this on the prisoner in the details of Ashcraft v. Tennessee which was heard by the Supreme Court in 1945 Ashcraft was placed a table in an interrogation room "with a light over his head" and the officers questioned him in relays for about 40 hours. "Ashcraft swears that the first thing said to him when he was taken into custody, was "Why in hell did you kill your wife?"; that during the course of the examination he was threatened and abused in various ways; and that as the hours passed his eyes became blinded by a powerful electric light, his body became weary, and the strain on his nerves became unbearable." (Ashcraft v. Tennessee, p. 150). In a series of decisions culminating in Ashcraft, the Supreme Court rejected the convictions obtained in this manner maintaining that these situations were 'inherently coercive." (Ashcraft v. Tennessee (1945) p. 153; Brown v. Mississippi, 1935: 279-285; Chambers v. Florida 1939 (238-241) ) Sensing that the tide was turning, law enforcement officials began advising police officers not to use the third degree interrogation because it constituted torture. Policemen were told that torture does not produce truth, that the courts would in any case not admit it, and it undermined public confidence in the police. (Kidd, 45-47). Finally, a real man does not torture. If you resort to torture, you admit your victim is the better man. When you "break" a man by torture he will hate you. If you break him by your intelligence, he will always fear and respect you" (Kidd, p. 49). In particular police advised not to use glaring lights since these "constitute duress" This does not mean that light does not have a place in police interrogations. On the contrary, "the light source should be arranged to light the subject fully, not the officer." (p. 59). And there is evidence that the CIA showed no such restraint in its interrogation of Soviet defectors in the 1960s, and the use of glaring lights is so common in torture interrogations throughout the world that it often goes uncommented. Transition to Section II We are now in a position to answer tentatively the three questions posed at the outset: how did knowledge of the electrification of human bodies accumulate? how did electricity enter into the interrogation process? and how was it transformed into a process of shocking the victim? Electricity entered the interrogatory process in the 1920s in North Atlantic societies indirectly through the use of light and heat, not through electrical discharge directly to the body. However, electricity had already penal process in the 1890s, and it was in this context that electrical charge was directly applied to the human body. This charge could not be controlled well though, and the entire goal became to determine what was the sufficient charge to kill This led to an evergrowing body of knowledge regarding electrocution, which subsequently came to have numerous medical as well as political uses. But this knowledge falls short of what was required for the construction of a proper electric torture instrument, namely, what is the maximal amount of shock that can deliver maximal pain and yet allow the victim to live? What is also absent is the an electric instrument that applies a charge directly to the prisoner in the course of the interrogation process. Watershock approximates the effects, but it is of course not an electrical device, nor does it have the portability that characterizes electric torture instruments. What we are looking for then is the earliest device that applies charge directly to the prisoner, whose charge can be regulated as needed. To find this instrument, we must go south of the equator to Argentina, where we find the very first such device, the picana electrica and then to Italy in 1938 with the invention of ElectroConvulsive Therapy (ECT). Section II: Beef and Ham In this section I describe the first two devices that meet what I have analytically defined as an electric torture instrument. These instruments are the ECT device and the picana electrica. Argentina Among Argentine scholars, there is unanimity on the date of the invention of the picana electrica. All scholars date it to the 1930s after the election of Augustin P. Justo in 1932. Molas dates it specifically to 1934 in Buenos Aires (Molas, p. 103). What is a picana? A picana is a kind of cattleprod. It is an instrument used to drive or streer oxen pulling a wagon. Picana derives from "picar" to prick or puncture plus a Quechua suffix -na. The non-electric picana is a stick of approximately three meters in length with a one centimeter iron barb stuck in the point. (Graziano, p. 160) The electrical picana is a rather different kind of device. Our earliest account offers the following short description: "a wire, a wooden handle, and a large steel point, whose end crackles, invisible, blazing with demons of current." (Estrella, p. 50). The electrical picana operates on direct current, but it can be plugged into the wall socket of the victim's home with the aid of a transformer. It is transported in a suitcase and usually powered by an automobile battery. It is manned by two people. The first worked the bobbin raising and reducing the voltage. The other applied the electricity by applying a pole to the victim. The sleeve is insulated and the bronze or copper tip applied to the body. The voltage of the first picanas varied between 12000 and 16000 volts with a thousandth of an ampere (Estrella, p. 50; cf Lamas, p. 38). This voltage is modest by comparison to modern tasers that offer up to 200,000 volts, but it is the amperage that's the key element: the low amperage made the picana electrica a useful tool in torture interrogations. The picana's design has remained the same over the last give decades; the only variant is the 'rake' which is a three pronged picana. Likewise, torturers employ the picana in the same way. Using the picana is a two person operation. The tortured are strapped to a wooden table and wetted down to aid the current. The prod operator applies the wand to sensitive parts of the body (head, temples, mouth, genitalia, breasts, ) while the machine operator regulates the voltage. The victim usually bites on rubber or lead to make sure that the tongue is not bit off during the shocks. Usually, there is a doctor present to make sure that the victim has no heart problems, can survive the interrogation. Other accounts indicate a doctor keeps tabs on the pulse of the victim during the interrogation. The doctor also intervenes if that is necessary during the torture process. Turning to the picana's exact origins, Estrella says that the original electrical picana was an experimental design of the Special Section of the Buenos Aires police in the days of Augusto P. Justo in the 1930s (Estrella, p. 29) but it is unlikely that the police invented it. We already have detailed accounts of the kinds of torture techniques used in Buenos Aires prisons in the early 1930s (Molas, p. 98). There is no question Justo's police used an extraordinary range of machines and devices. Yet all of them are musculo-skeletal devices, that is, they operate on the principle of stretching muscles or bones into chronically painful positions. The picana, on the other hand, belongs to a different set of torture devices, those that ignore the muscle and skeleton and harness the internal systems of the body (nerves, blood vessels). To have invented the picana would take an incredible act of imagination for policemen who were quite busy torturing and were more than amply armed with torture devices they knew how to use quite well. My view is that the first electric picanas were used in the new slaughterhouses to prod cattle along, but this is speculative. I have been unable to find references to electric picanas in histories of the early beef industry in Argentina. What I can say is that in the early twentieth century, the Argentine beef industry was electrified. The main impetus for this were American corporations interested in electrical refrigeration of beef so it could be transported to Europe and the United States. The American Frigorificos expanded beef production from a paltry 9,500 tons of beef in 1900 at the turn of the century to 515,846 tons in 1928. Along with increased demand came a rapid expansion of the cattle industry. (Sycks, p. 9-11). I can only speculate that when the picana was electrified it was not done by gauchos on the pampas, but in the context of the meat packing factories. This much certain. Europeans used electric stunning in abattoirs from the turn of the century and already in 1902, Boekelman had published papers on the electric stunning of animals for slaughter and its effects on the quality of the meat. By 1929, Weinberger and Muller developed a stun device for pig slaughterhouses at the University of Munich and became widespread for pigs, sheep and calves in the 1930s. Muller went on to study the use of direct current for electrical stunning of cattle prior to slaughter at the Munich Abattoir. There is in other words, considerable evidence that such devices existed and were in use, although the precise connection in Argentina needs to be worked out. There is also a second problem in documenting the origin of the picana. While Argentine sources agree that the picana was invented in the 1930s, the earliest recorded accounts by prisoners come from the 1940s and 1950s. Molas, for example, lists the kinds of torture techniques used in Buenos Aires prisons in 1931 and 1932, and the picana electrica is not among them. (Molas p. 98). Similarly, Lamas emphasizes that the picana was an original Argentine invention, yet he cites in this regard, not an Argentine source, but a French police manual that makes this claim. And the earliest source, Estrella, is equally certain in 1956 that the picana predates World War II, but he offers no corroboration of his claim that Justo's police used them. If anyone is aware of any corroborating evidence, I would be most grateful for the reference. What we can say for certain is that by 1948, the picana electrica is definitely in use by the Argentine police (Mellor, 228); the first torture accounts date from this period. We can also say for certain that the picana is not used in any police force outside of Argentina for the next 30 years, after which it spread to Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia (De Graziano, 286). The Chilean police under Pinochet, no strangers to electric torture, did not use the picana during the 1970s. In fact, for at least another twenty years, there is no device that shares the same design as the picana. In short, for reasons that are unclear, the picana did not spread easily to other police forces. Italy I would like to turn now to the other instrument, the device that delivers shocks for Electro-Convulsive Therapy, what I shall call, the ECT machine. In the case of this machine, it is quite easy to date both its date and the circumstances of its invention. The prototype ECT device was devised by Ugo Cerletti and Dr. Bini in the early 1930s in Italy. It consisted of a voltmeter and a device for fractionating the time of application of the current in tenths of seconds. The shock carried is approximately the power needed to light a lightbulb, 100-150 volts. In 1938, Bini provided the Roman Medical Academy with the machine's specifications, and he also attempted to make the application of shock "safe and comfortable". Bini added to this apparatus, equipment to check for inappropriate application of electrodes and short circuits, but was criticized for this by electrologists at the Copenhagen Congress in 1939. In 1940, he worked with an engineer Arcioni in Milan to create a new machine, and offered the patent rights to Cerletti. Cerletti declined, "pointing out not only that I had not had a hand in the bringing forth of the new apparatus, but also that it would not be easy to patent a piece of equipment essentially made up of a voltmeter, a transformer, a clockwork switch and the headband with electrodes to transmit the current." According to Cerletti, very shortly after that, new equipment was produced in Italy, France, Germany and England, and the equipment became streamlined. Today, there are least 6 types of ECT machines available on the market. Bini's machine has been supplanted by new models that deliver between 109 and 135 volts. Cerletti grudgingly conceded that Bini's "elegant and comfortable apparatus has contributed to the rapid spread of the method" even though he insisted that "the invention of ECT does not consist, as many have believed and still believe, in a special instrument." (92) In one sense, Cerletti is correct. Psychologists and biologists had used electricity on animals and for treatment for centuries. The modern use can be dated to 1744 when the Histoire de L'Academie Royal des Sciences of France brought about a report on "Electricity and Medicine" every second year. Probably the first convulsions induced by electro shock occurred in 1755 when hysterical blindness was successfully treated. At the beginning of the nineteenth century electro-therapy fell into disuse but began again in the 1830s when scientists developed more accurate measurements of electricity Multiple volumes of books were written on the subject and prestigious academies awarded psychiatrists for their work on this subject. Harms suggests that no sincere European psychiatrist could work without electrotherapy. But by the end of the 19th century, psychologists were once against skeptical. At the Electrotherapeutic conference in Frankfurt in 1891, the dominant opinion was that electricity had some modest value in treating hysteria or peripheral nerve paralysis. By the beginning of the 20th century, interest had waned considerably "because of prejudice, lack of consistent success in the use of electrical procedures, and the increasing interest in other methods of therapy." (Stainbrook: 1948). By the early 1930s, comphor, carbon dioxide gas, insulin, and the drug Metrazol had been used to induce comas or convulsions to treat schizophrenics and depressives. Cerletti is also correct in identifying himself the inventor of ECT. Certainly no one was more decisive in promoting the new kind of electric therapy known as ECT and in 1950 he offered his own account of his discovery. Cerletti was interested in epileptic fits, and he had been applying strong electric currents to dogs throughout the early 1930s in Genoa and Rome. Having inadvertently killed some dogs, he set out to determine what were the most favorable conditions for survival. But his main goal was to show that the kinds of fits he induced in dogs were genuinely epileptic fits, and to this end, the dogs were first shocked and then their brains were prepared histologically. Cerletti was convinced that ECT would be of aid in therapy for schizophrenics, but to promote his method, he first needed to disarm the profession's fear of high tension currents. "The spectre of the electric chair was in the minds of all and an imposing mass of medical literature enumerated the casualties, often fatal, ensuing upon electrical discharges across the human body...The fact is that no one at the clinic seriously thought of applying electric convulsions to man," wrote Cerletti. (p. 89)The issue depressed Cerletti since he was not certain how he could prove that a discharge of electricity would "prove equally harmless to a man if the duration of the current's passage were reduced to a minimum interval" (Cerletti, p. 89). In the midst of depression and inactivity, a colleague, Professor Vanni told him that in Rome, the slaughterhouse pigs are all killed by electricity. Determined to face death by electricity in its fullest, Cerletti went to the Roman slaughterhouse where butchers held pigs near their ears with a large scissors shaped pair of pincers. The pincers were electrified and terminated in two electrodes enclosing a wet sponge. The pigs keeled over in convulsions, and the butcher then gave the neck a deep slash, bleeding the pig to death. Cerletti was ecstatic because it was not only clear that the pigs demonstrated the same fits that he was inducing in dogs, but that it was emphatically false that the pigs were being killed by electricity. On the contrary, they were being bled to death during an epileptic coma. He immediately set about reversing his electricity experiments. He wanted to determine not how to keep animals alive, but rather, how much electricity was necessary to kill a pig. He obtained authorization from the slaughterhouse director and spent a day trying to electrocute pigs. He found that this was by no means easy, and that pigs could be electrocuted several times but after five or six minutes would often revive. All his doubts vanished and "I gave instructions in the clinic to undertake, the next day, the experiment upon man. Very likely, except for this fortuitous and fortunate circumstance of pigs' pseudo-electrical butchery, electroshock would not yet have been born." (Cerletti, p. 90). Cerletti's first subject was a 40 year old schizophrenic who expressed himself exclusively in an incomprehensible gibberish. Cerletti emphasizes that he and his colleague, Bini, conducted the experiment in an atmosphere of "fearful silence bordering on disapproval". They applied the electrodes, wetted in salt solution and held by an elastic band, to the patient's temples. The results of the first shock of 70 volts disappointed Cerletti, and over the objections of his assistants, he arranged to repeat the test. Then suddenly, the patient said in a lucid conversational tone, "Not a second. Deadly!" But of course, this had the opposite effect on Cerletti who immediately gave the patient a 110 discharge for .5 seconds. The patient fell into an epileptic fit, and then gradually came to sat up on his own accord and answered Cerletti's questions lucidly. This according to Cerletti is how ECT therapy was born one day in 1937. The rest, as he would say, is History. ECT was demonstrated at the Rome Medical Academy in 1938. While Cerletti lay out his discovery in a monograph in 1940, the war made circulation of the monograph impossible. This turned out to be unimportant, however, because one Kalinowsky had seen the Roman demonstration and had gone to the US in 1939. There he cited the demonstration in his bibliographies, and ECT entered into Anglo-Saxon psychological circles. In 1948, two English Surgeons, L.G.M. Page and R.J. Russell, wrote the benchmark article on ECT. The Page-Russell technique used powerful multiple shocks, but no more than five in one treatment. (Thomas, p. 149) Gradually, two methods of ECT developed. Unmodified ECT, employed by Cerletti, is when current is applied to both sides of the head while the patient is awake. In Modified ECT, which became popular in the 1950s and 1960s, a general anesthetic is administered along with a muscle relaxant prior to the shock. Further, electricity is applied unilaterally (as opposed to bilaterally) to the non dominate side of the head (left for righties, right for lefties). We can gauge the popularity of ECT among therapists in terms of numbers. By 1978, 100,000-200,000 estimated patients treated annually as of 1978. A Massachusetts commission found that private hospitals used ECT on 28 per cent of their patients, and that several "shock shops" existed where as many as 70 per cent received ECT. The CIA and ECT All this is very interesting, but what is the evidence that ECT devices are used in the course of torture? There is sporadic anecdotal evidence from some countries (Morocco, Afghanistan) police forces in the 1980s used devices resembling the ECT machine. But the main evidence has been gathered by John Marks, Gordon Thomas, and Peter Shrag. These authors have painstakingly documented CIA funding for electroshock experiments in the 1950s and early 1960s and there use in some non-therapeutic circumstances. At the end of 1951, the CIA was very interested in learning techniques for brainwashing. Morse Allen, a CIA operative, was advised by a famed psychiatrist, a cleared Agency consultant, "that electroshock treatments could produce amnesia for varying lengths of time and that he had been able to obtain information from patients as they came out of the stupor that followed shock treatments." The psychologist also reported that "a lower setting of the Reiter electroshock machine produced an "excruciating pain" that, while nontherapeutic, could be effective as "a third degree method" to make someone talk." According to Marks "Morse Allen asked if the psychiatrist had ever taken advantage of the "groggy" period that followed normal electroshock to gain hypnotic control of the patients. No, replied the psychiatrist, but he would try it in the near future and report back to the Agency. The psychiatrist also mentioned that continued electroshock treatments could gradually reduce a subject to the 'vegetable level,' and that these treatments could not be detected unless the subject was given EEG tests within two weeks." In his own report, Allen noted the availability of new portable battery driven electroshock machines and recommended pursuing this research despite reservations: " "The objections would, of course, apply to the use of electroshock if the end result was the creation of a 'vegetable'; [I] believe that these techniques should not be considered except in gravest emergencies, and neutralization by confinement and/or removal from the area would be far more appropriate and certainly safer." A short time later, the Office of Scientific Intelligence recommended that this same psychiatrist be given $100,000 in research funds "to develop electric shock and hypnotic techniques" There is good reason to believe that this funding went to Dr. Cameron at Allen Memorial Hospital in Montreal. But in any case, CIA research in this area no doubt culminated in Cameron's work. According to Thomas, Cameron had followed the work of Cerletti from its inception in 1938, a fact I am trying to confirm. During the war, Cameron had worked as part of a team of psychiatrists that advised John Foster Dulles on how to change the attitudes of Germans and their leaders. Cameron had synthesized a variety of techniques in documents like "mass hysteria in a war situation" and some of Cameron's techniques struck Dulles as original and far reaching. Take for example Cameron's proposal that "after the war each surviving German over the age of twelve should receive a short course of electroshock treatment to burn out any remaining vestige of Nazism." (Thomas, 152) Thus in less than 6 years, ECT had moved from the realm of psychology into the realm of mass indoctrination. Cameron's reputation continued to grow in the 1950s. Cameron received further CIA funding to use ECT not only to undo people's memories but to provide them with new ones. At Allan Memorial Hospital, Cameron applied ECT devices to patients at settings more powerful than any recommended by the experienced practitioners of the Page-Russell method. Cameron also applied ECT more times than recommended under the Page Russell method. A report on the state of Quebec's mental hospitals in the early 1960s singled out the Allan memorial as using more electroshocks than any other hospital in the province. In 1961, 12000 electrical treatments-- on the Page-Russell system this would amount to 60,000 separate shocks, were given to a thousand patients in the institute. In short, the only thing that set Cameron's method apart from the kind of torture applied later in Morocco using ECT devices is the fact that he anaesthetized his patients before he applied the shocks. And this was precisely what was not done in a number of instances in the 1960s. There are, for example, reports from Britain in the 1960s and 1970s that ECT devices were applied to prisoners as treatment without anesthesia. But perhaps the most chilling example comes from Saigon in the summer of 1966 when a Dr. Lloyd Cotter, a psychiatrist from Pomona and two CIA doctors arrived at Bien Hoa Hospital with a portable ECT machine. During the period of their stay, Dr. Cotter applied ECT to the hospital patients while the Agency doctors applied ECT to Vietcong prisoners who were held in a small heavily guarded compound at the rear of the hospital. Dr. Cotter reported evident improvement in the behavior of the patients, but he fears that this was the result of their dislike or fear of ECT while but the Agency doctors were less successful at depatterning the Vietcong soldiers. While doctor continued a busy summer of "several thousand shock treatments as we started about one new ward a week on the program" the Agency doctors managed to kill all their Vietcong prisoners and left after 3 weeks. (Thomas, p. 259). The line between torture and treatment in this incident is next to impossible to determine. I want to emphasize however that the use of ECT machines in police torture remains quite rare. The machines are expensive and typically don't deliver the voltage necessary. Thus despite their ubiquitousness in mental asylums worldwide and CIA investment, ECT devices are not benchmark torture devices. Transition to Section III What then is the origin of the first two electric torture devices? I am convinced that neither the ECT nor the picana was conceivable outside of the mass consumption of meat. The electrification of meat was a somewhat controversial subject in the 1930s, and numerous scientific studies had to be conducted guaranteeing public safety. This is particularly the case regarding the edibility of ham. There is no question that Cerletti's work came right out of the Roman slaughterhouses. Although the connection between beef production and the electrical picana is speculative, I am hopeful that a more precise link can be discovered. The story of these two machines serves to underline a methodological point in the investigation of torture technology, namely, that the story of human torture cannot be conducted without the study of animal torture. In both cases, I would argue, the electric torture technology passes from animal slaughterhouses, where it is tested and perfected, to human applications. And as we saw in the case of Edison's dogs, this is not the only time where animal models were involved in the history of electric torture technology. This brings me to a second point which I now want to document more fully. The picana electrica and the ECT machine do not belong to the Nazi Gestapo. They antedate the Gestapo considerably. More than that, the Gestapo never used electric torture. The German Gestapo Unfortunately, there is no history of Gestapo torture techniques. This work is work that is yet to be written and it would be a difficult endeavor. The difficulties include the fact that Gestapo torture varied from region to region and that documents are missing, and those that exist have are written in a sanitized language. My method has been to reconstruct Gestapo torture from bottom up narratives, that is, by reading accounts such as they exist of survivors of Gestapo torture. My belief is that these people have the most direct access. They also have every incentive to say the worst things they can about Gestapo torture. While ordinarily this can lead to exaggeration, in this instance, it is extremely helpful. If electrical torture was used, torture victims will be certain to mention it. Having gone through narratives from Germany, Denmark, Norway, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Italy, I have not been able to find a single instance of electric torture. This is not meant to imply in the least that the Gestapo was not a very terrifying and cruel police force. Tortures in Norway, for example, include flogging, beatings with batons, punitive repetitious exercises, begin dragged by the hair or ear, burning the flesh with hot iron, cold water shock, and applying hot wires to the skin. In Germany, prisoners describe a number of devices, none of which are electrical. Von Scharbendorf describes machines that stuck pins into his hands or cylinders that dug pings into his legs, but no electroshock mechanisms. Prisoners, like Boehnhoffer, also report regular beatings, sleep deprivation, exhaustive repetitious exercises, and solitary isolation in the dark. The behavior of the Gestapo moreover conforms with the scant documentary evidence that we possess. On June 4, 1937, the Ministry of Justice and the Gestapo legalized torture to such an extent that they established a standard club to be used in beatings so that the torture would be regularized. The minutes established crimes for which "rigorous interrogation" was permitted (namely treason and high treason), as well as those that it did not apply to (homosexuality). Blows were to be administered to the buttocks. (Muller 178-9) There is no historical evidence that a single German officer in any branch used electric torture in any country in Europe. Nevertheless, we must carefully look at the case of Nazi France. I have deliberately set aside France because it is here that we DO find torturers who use, among other things, electric torture although they are not German. These torturers are members of the equipe Lafont-Bony. They were French, usually former criminals. Many of them had been hired by Lafont directly out of their jail cells in Fresnes prison. According to one report, Lafont looked from cell to cell until he met faces he recognized. There are three points to make about the Lafont-Bony team. Although they are sometimes called the "Gestapo Francaise, " this is incorrect in several regards. Lafont originally worked for the German Abwehr and then sold the services of his operation to the Gestapo in 1943. Other torturers worked for other branches before being organized by Lafont and his aide, Bonny. The Lafont-Bonny group received no Gestapo training and had no rank within the German army. The group quite multinational. While the vast majority were French, their ranks included Belgians, Italians, Algerians, Jewish Bessarabians, and Iranians. It is clear enough, however, that the group as a whole was quite ambitious and inventive. Masuy, who invented a variety of unique tortures, claimed at his trial that he was always searching for new and more efficient torture methods. Philippe Aziz writes that "Dan le domaine de la torture, les agents français étaient plus raffinés et plus cruels. Ils se montraient plus nazis que les nazies eux-mêmes." Second, even among this group, only two individuals had any interest in electric torture techniques, Henri Lafont and Pierre Bonny. Masuy himself was much more interested in the torture of the cold bathtub for which he is famous. Other torturers were equally uninterested. Electric torture cannot be found in the provincial teams; only in Paris and then only under the Lafont-Bonny torture center at Rue Lauriston. At Rue Lauriston, there was a magnéto, which Delarue describes a device where a wire was attached to one ankle and the second wire was run over the most sensitive parts of the anatomy. The account in Black suggests that the magnéto's power source is the power grid: "Système simple. Branchement de deux fils." (confirmed by Lyon). This seems odd since a magneto should be an independent source of power, so why call it a magneto if it has to be plugged in? Black also describes another method employed at rue Lauriston: "l'épreuve du banc électrique oú leurs pieds rôtissaient lentement." Unfortunately, he does not provide any further details. These details bring me to my third point. The electric torture Lafont-Bonny employ is very rudimentary. It bears no resemblance to ECT machines or the picana electrica. Unlike the ECT machine there is no time regulator of the duration of the shock. Unlike the picana there is no want or voltage meter to regulate the shock's intensity and no second operator manning the bobbin. We may, in fact, never know where Lafont or those under him got the idea of using electricity for torture. As I have indicated, there is no evidence that the Germans, even the Gestapo, used electric torture. Nor is there evidence that the French police at Fresnes use electricity to discipline prisoners. What we can say is that the Lafont techniques did not spread. There is no evidence of Lafont's techniques in later French history in Algeria, a history which, one might add, is replete with electrical torture. The vast majority of this Algerian torture was meted out through field telephones and other devices that required portable dynamos or magnetos, items which were available to Lafont but which neither he nor his team members used. The French use of field telephones in Algeria serves to underline a further mystery. If the Germans had wanted to use electrical torture, they could have arrived at it in the same way as the French. European armies carried portable electric generators as part of field telephone units begin in 1900. Here's a description of German power generators during WWII
There was in short no impediment to German electric torture: The Gestapo had both motive and opportunity. It simply did not resort to it. I am not certain what to make of the fact that German troops and Gestapo did not resort to electrical torture despite motive and opportunity. Within France, Oberg's established rules of interrogation in a note from June 10, 1943 but there is no documentary proof that high German officers approved or condoned torture techniques other than the baton beatings. I am puzzled that the use of electrical torture was not more widespread throughout World War II. But it was not. Conclusion I have two points to make, one positive and the other negative. The negative one first. At the close of the second world war, electric torture had gripped the French imagination. "Every Frenchman heard of these tortures.' (Delarue, 243) "Every Frenchman heard of these bestial tortures." (Yann:23) And as it became known that the French army resorted to electric torture in Algeria and Vietnam, it was not difficult for journalists to connect the dots in the manner of Chagaray:
The temptation is even more overwhelming in light of Nazis who find shelter in Argentina and the United States after the war. But it is clear that the dots cannot be connected in this way. The dynamo existed but it was not used as part of interrogations until French troops used it routinely in Algeria and Vietnam. There is no evidence that the Gestapo used electric torture. And there is no evidence that electric torture was quotidian during World War II. On the positive side, The history of electric torture instruments in the early twentieth century is more tangled, grayer, and terribly uncertain. Police forces drew on what was already in use and applied it to some new purpose, but not all forces used these devices nor in the same manner. If borrowing occurred it did not always occur at the highest levels of authority, but rather at the local level. There is considerable exchange of techniques between the meat industry and psychologists and police interested in electric devices to apply to human beings. Mass electrification and mass meat consumption are involved in the history of electric torture. Corporations seem to be involved in most incidents. It seems Finally, there is a mystery. None of the techniques and instruments I have outlined here are destined to become ubiquitous in the last half of the century. We are still a long way away from mass produced tasers, electric batons, and stun guns. The great innovation of the late twentieth century was the production of instruments that were more portable (smaller, easily powered), more powerful, more flexible (can be used by one person who has no training), and safer (for both the carrier to use and doesn't kill the victim). For that road, we must explore the French colonial wars of the 1950s but that is the subject of another paper. |