You’d have preferred they just went ahead
and broke your bones, or perhaps ran your head under freezing cold water until you thought
you were drowning. It would have been much better than the whiteness,
that deafening, unrelenting, whiteness. For months on end you saw no colors at all. The cell was white... the walls, the door,
and the floor. Your clothes were white, and all day and night
they kept a bright white light shining. When they put food through the door, it was
always the same dish – white rice...on a white plate. Never did you hear any voices, except those
inside your head. If you wanted to use the bathroom, you had
to slip a piece of white paper under the door. Then guards, wearing padded shoes, would shuffle
along silently to open the door, and then you could use the white bathroom. After months of this you started to forget
who you were. The voices in your head became real. You couldn’t even remember what your parents
looked like. Welcome to the world of white torture. What we just described to you is what is sometimes
called an “enhanced interrogation technique”, and in this case what is referred to as extreme
sensory deprivation. The person who suffered it is one Amir Fakhravar,
a former prisoner in Iran. His crime was being critical of the Iranian
regime. As an activist in the late 90s and early 2000s,
he said that he was imprisoned and interrogated on a number of occasions. He said that he has be beaten to the extent
that his bones were broken, but nothing, nothing was as brutal as white torture. The good news for him is when he got out after
spending eight months in that white room, he managed to flee Iran and move to the USA. He was lucky. Other former regime critics who have had a
stay at the notorious Evin Prison in Iran have described how some inmates were tortured
to death there. Some prisoners have been executed at Evin,
others had parts of them amputated, some have been blinded, and most were kept in what has
been called horrific conditions. Let’s stick with Iran for a minute and hear
what an Iranian journalist named Ebrahim Nabavi had to say about white torture. In 2004, he got on the phone to Human Rights
Watch. This is part of the conversation:
“Since I left Evin, I have not been able to sleep without sleeping pills. It is terrible. The loneliness never leaves you, long after
you are free. Every door that is closed on you ... This
is why we call it white torture. They get what they want without having to
hit you… You begin to break. And once you break, they have control. And then you begin to confess.” Another former prisoner in one of Iran’s
white cells described it like this: “After three days, it becomes so, so difficult. Different people break at different times. We used to talk about when people would break. Some people broke after a few days, some could
last much, much longer. It is absolute silence. After three days, I just wanted any words. Even if it was swearing, even if it was a
harsh interrogation.” In a nutshell, that’s what white torture
is all about…breaking a person. It’s when a government – and as you’ll
see, not only the Iranian government – wants a person to experience hell and so tells them
what they want to know. It leaves no bruises, no scars, except for
ones of the psychological kind. Has this ever happened to prisoners housed
in the USA? According to human rights organizations, the
answer is yes. The New York Times in 2019 talked about the
CIA’s torture program, the enhanced interrogation techniques that have been used at Guantánamo
Bay and others black sites, such as a secret prison the CIA had in Thailand. The techniques used included things such as
keeping men in stress positions so they couldn’t sleep for days, or waterboarding prisoners,
or keeping men confined in a small box where they couldn’t properly sit. The organization called “European Democratic
Lawyers” wrote that “interrogatory technicians” working at the Guantánamo facility would
sometimes take men and cover their eyes and ears. They’d then put thick gloves on the prisoner’s
hands and tie their feet. This kind of sensory deprivation was called
a kind of white torture, but it sounds more like dark torture. Still, the outcome is the same…the prisoner
begins to lose his mind. A similar thing went down at Abu-Ghraib prison
in Iraq, and the world got to know about this after a series of photos were released. The U.S. Army would at times dress men in
boiler suits, tie them, put masks over their mouths, and cover their eyes and ears. The result of the torture would always be
a numbing of the prisoner’s senses, so much so that they began to mentally unravel. But the British were doing a similar thing
a long time before it happened in Iraq. In the 1970s, people suspected of being involved
with the Irish Republican Army were taken from their homes or off the streets without
standing trial. They were then taken to a secret interrogation
center and were put through something called the “Five Techniques.” Those were: hooding, wall-standing, deprivation
of sleep, subjection to noise, and deprivation of food and drink. When the men were in their cells they were
handcuffed and hooded, so they were literally in the dark all the time. To make things worse, the British continuously
played a recording of a hissing noise, or what’s been called a kind of white noise. The prisoners might at any time get kicked
in the groin, having not even known someone had entered the cell. This created constant stress and the inability
to sleep. What was the object of this sensory deprivation? It was to cause the worst kind of depression,
crippling anxiety, and after a while hallucinations and even loss of consciousness. The Brits used it in the Iraq war, too, and
imported it to the U.S., Israel and Brazil. How do countries get away with this? Well, they say it’s not strictly torture
and more enhanced interrogation, something human rights groups have been criticizing
for years. In Venezuela, the authorities have their own
take on white torture. Underneath a building in the city of Caracas
there is a place called, “La Tumba”, or “The Tomb” in English. There, prisoners are kept in tiny cells, cells
that are painted white. They’re not allowed any interaction with
guards or other prisoners, and they can hear no sounds. All day and night a bright light shines in
their cell, and so after a while the prisoners have no idea what time it is. Not surprisingly, there are reports of some
of them trying to kill themselves. Others might suffer from vomiting, diarrhea,
or hallucinations. One mother of an inmate there told the media,
“He’s buried alive, practically waiting to die.” Could you survive white torture? We doubt it…we doubt anyone could get through
white torture without succumbing to madness. Human Rights Watch spoke to a former inmate
of a place called Prison 59 in Iran. That prisoner had seen the isolation cells
and had this to say about them, “I cannot imagine spending one night in those solitary
cells without losing my mind.” And it’s not just about what happens in
the white rooms, but what happens once you get out. As one former detainee in Iran said, “I
went in as one person and came out another person.” Now you need to watch this, “Crucifixion
- Worst Punishments in the History of Mankind.” Or have a look at this, “Boiling Alive - Worst
Punishments in the History of Mankind.”
already in one
This method isn’t as widely used as people think. I remember the effects of it being debunked too.