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.”