By Sydney A. Perry

While we celebrate the victory of the Maccabees this week, lighting candles, eating latkes, and singing songs about dreidels and prayers which praise “the delivery of the mighty into the hands of the weak,” there is another narrative of Chanukah – a macabre story – which we rarely acknowledge. In the infrequently read Chapter 7 of Maccabees II, we learn of the gristly martyrdom of an unnamed woman and her seven sons. They are brutally tortured, one by one, by the tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes, for their refusal to eat pork.

Torture is very much in the news now that the 500-page summary report of the CIA has been released by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The pictures of humiliated detainees in Abu Ghraib, naked and shackled, turn out not to have been an anomaly after all. The review of six million CIA documents appear to confirm that the euphemistically termed “enhanced interrogation” was employed to glean information and obtain confessions in the aftermath of Sept.11, 2001.

The revelation of the brutal interrogation techniques of ice baths, rectal hydration, waterboarding, and sleep deprivation, turn out to have produced false statements and lies and no actionable information.

What made us think that information from a tortured human is a sure way of attaining truth?

Anthony Grafton, an historian of early modern Europe, makes clear, through examination of court transcripts of interrogations during the Inquisition, that desperate Jewish defendants, when subjected to the agonies of the strappado – a pulley system that would lift a prisoner toward the ceiling and then drop him or her countless times, dislocating limbs, breaking bones and inflicting stunning pain – would strive desperately to confess. Unsure of the crime they were accused of, they invented plots, named names, implicated loved ones and co-religionists in other communities, all to make the pain cease.

In his book Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, Jacobo Timerman, an Argentinean newspaper publisher and passionate advocate of human rights and social justice, tells his horrifying story of arrest, imprisonment, interrogation and torture in 1977-79 by the military government. His account is not written in the flat prose of the Inquisition: He includes groans, shrieks, pleas for mercy. Taken for countless applications of electric shocks, lying on a table, stripped, doused with water, with hands and legs tied, he describes the inhuman howls torn from him. Timerman writes that while imprisoned, he often would hear people, after prolonged torture, urging that they would sign whatever was demanded, as he himself did, or plead to be killed.

Jean Amery was born in Vienna and in 1938 immigrated to Belgium, where he joined the resistance movement. Caught by the Nazis in 1943, tortured by the Gestapo, he survived the next two years at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Amery depicts his torture as a reduction of the self to the purely physical, with an accompanying loss of faith in the world.

In At the Mind’s Limits, he writes: “Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. … What one’s fellow man has experienced by the anti-man remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror.”

He was hung on a chain from the ceiling, his hands behind his back, his shoulders splintered and sprung from their sockets. With his dislocated arms twisted over his head, blows from a horsewhip showering his body, he was questioned as to his accomplices in the underground; their addresses and meeting places – all were unknown to him. Nothing he said under torture was true.

After the infamous treatment of prisoners and horrific pictures from Abu Ghraib came to public view, U.S. Senator John McCain, himself a victim for five years of torture by the North Vietnamese, offered an amendment to the Detainee Treatment Act that explicitly outlawed the use of “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”

No matter how odious the crimes of those who were held in prisons might be, sadistic treatments devised to exert “total control” for obtaining actionable intelligence debases not only the victim but also the perpetrator.

We live in a democracy where the law is first, not those in power. It is precisely because we live by the rule of law that we have a moral and ethical imperative to stop torture. Senator McCain says correctly: “I dispute whole-heartedly that it was right for them to use these methods, which this report makes clear were neither in the best interest of justice nor our security nor the ideals we have sacrificed so much blood and  treasure to defend.”

Sydney A. Perry is Chief Executive Officer of the Jewish Federation of Greater New Haven, 360 Amity Road, Woodbridge 06525. E-mail: sperry@jewishnewhaven.org.