Torture

TORTURE is not a new phenomenon. The Romans, claiming intellectual superiority over the world’s multitudinous races, chained and caged their captives, sold them on a slave market, and sometimes trained them for gruesome combat as gladiators in their ancient coliseums. Jesus Christ was not spared. He was scourged with a horse whiplash, crowned with thorns, and nails hammered into his hands and feet, tearing flesh as His crucifix is raised.
The Spaniards, claiming to be devout Christians, burned and beheaded religious heretics, including godly martyrs later declared saints by Catholic Popes. The British, French, Spanish, and Portuguese slave traders, spurred on by the false belief of their superior civilization, chained, flogged and starved ship rowers captured from all over Africa, even as they scalped and beheaded native Americans. Adolf Hitler’s highly educated German medical doctors performed gruesome experiments of mutilation, blinding, decapitation, poisoning, and suffocation on live Jewish prisoners treated as guinea pigs on claims of Aryan supremacy. But most nations have long progressed in their outlook on the torture and execution of captives.

However, in the Philippines today, Greek letter fraternities flourishing in our best universities have imbibed the sadistic mentality that has pervaded humanity since time immemorial. The machismo culture has been passed on down the centuries with the more masculine dominating the weaker, invading most universities where students are tortured through initiation rites that require brutal hazing. Such sadistic traditions result in the wounding, maiming, mutilation, disabling and killing of university students, still in their adolescence, in sickening regularity. Even high school students, and school drop-outs, are now joining the brutal and deadly hazing rites of street gangs, slum gangs, and school fraternities patterned after university Greek-letter fraternities. Worse, Philippine military and police academies, ironically schools for law enforcement, are admittedly schools where torture is taught and their graduates considered as educated only when they are knowledgeable and experienced in inflicting the most inhumane atrocities on their detainees.

Recently, with the advent of more sophisticated telecommunications technology, the actual torture by Manila police officers on a suspected snatcher had been captured on cell phone video camera. The police torturers had forcibly undressed their captive, tied a wire around his genitals, whipped his face while pulling his genitals, causing excruciating pain. Police Chief Joselito Binayug even ordered his subordinates to execute his victim as victims undergoing such police procedure should not be left alive to tell his tale.
However, police officials are now demanding that the victim surfaces or that the video recorder come forward to testify. Reductio in absurdum. Volunteering testimony to police against a police official is in itself a death sentence. Those witnesses will most probably be summarily executed in this country.

In judicial rules on evidence, there is a principle: “Res Ipsa Loquitor” (The thing speaks for itself). The video recording is in itself the strongest piece of evidence of torture. What other stronger testimony can be elicited from any personal witness? The videotape constitutes real evidence, with every quivering muscle manifesting agonizing pain, every cry indicating excessive suffering, every statement showing outrage on a defenceless victim, captured on video. What else is needed to prove that a crime has been committed? What else is needed to specifically identify the actual torturers or the principals, who directly participated in the crime or who by their indispensable cooperation, allowed the torture to happen within the police precinct? Nothing else. But with the perverse police and military intellect that has pervaded this pathetic state of affairs, those torturers are expected to be promoted to a higher rank within the police or military hierarchy despite all the posturing now being pretentiously performed by their police superiors. Prior cases of robbery and extortion, including sexual assault and rape of female detainees, by Binayug and his subordinates have all been dismissed. Binayug has even been rewarded with highest distinction honors.

The Anti-Torture Act of 2009 sees torture as a gruesome offense punishable by itself, separate and distinct from any other crime that accompanies it. Torture, for example, is not absorbed by murder, and rightly so. Killing a person is a crime that must be punished. When the process is attended by a deliberate infliction of acts intended to cause hellish pain, those acts cannot be treated as mere aggravating circumstances; they are acts of torture that are now recognized and penalized as such. The torturer is himself a criminal despite pretentious posturing as a police or military official.

It is in the character of the torturer to claim ascendancy or superiority over his victims. It is in the nature of the beast to degrade, demean, destroy and reduce his victims so that he can claim such supremacy. It is the beastly nature of the sadist to prove his masculinity, his physical prowess, his dominance over his victims and diminish their humanity. Through the Anti-Torture Act, we now have the means to punish such beasts. –ERIC F. MALLONGA, Manila Times

ericfmallonga@yahoo.com