As in the Nazi concentration camps examined by Wolfgang Sofsky, "excessive violence was an everyday phenomenon" at S-21, the secret prison for counter-revolutionaries in Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea (1975-1979). The documents from the prison's volumnous archive that deal with torture, exude so much horror and speak so calmly about it that they are difficult to absorb, even as they draw us inexorably toward the victims. For example, in July 1977 an interrogator appended the following unsigned note to the confession of Ke Kim Huot, the former secretary of Sector 7 in the Northwest:

Another interrogator's comment vividly illustrates the lop-sided relationship between torturers and their victims which Michel Foucault has somewhat luxuriantly compared to a "duel" and a game of chess:

Coming face to face with documents like these, or the harrowing photographs from S-21, we are at a loss for words. To make things more difficult, there seems to be no overriding legal definition for torture, while Jean Amery, E. Valentine Daniel and Elaine Scarry have eloquently demonstrated that the experience of torture is impossible to put into words; Scarry even suggests that pain destroys language.

Why, then, do so many authors persist in trying to write about it ? Why should we? There is something unsettling about "fine writing" about pain. As Jean Amery has remarked, "Torture is the most horrible event a human being can retain within himself" . He adds that "The howl of pain defies communication through language". In spite or perhaps because of such warnings, writers and readers alike are drawn inexorably toward a subject which is ugly, frightening, seductive and impossible to represent.

As far as torture at S-21 is concerned, we can be emotionally wom down by by visiting the site, looking at the mug-shots or leafing through the archives It's tempting to take refuge in the received wisdom that "evil" in the DK period was all pervasive and encapsulated in the prison. It is certainly true that with every photograph and each

confession we know how things for that prisoner were going to turn out. Repeatedly we confront premonitions of violence, vivid descriptions of it and the repetitive fact of death. At the same time, we are insulated from what was happening to the minds and bodies of the victims and what happened to the perpetrators later on.

The scarcity of survivors and the dearth of oral testimony, trial transcripts or transcribed memories of prison life contrasts sharply with the voluminous literature and numerous survivors from the Soviet and Chinese Gulags and the Nazi concentration camps, or with materials dealing with torture and cruelty in other countries. The work of Christopher Browning, Daniel Goldhagen, Raul ffilberg and Gitta Sereny concerning German perpetrators of the Holocaust, for example, would be impossible to duplicate for S-21. So would the memoirs of Jean Amery, Primo Levi, Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Jacobo Timerman or E. Valentine Daniel's haunting study of Sri Lanka based in part on interviews with former torturers and victims. To study torture at S-21, we are thrown back onto documents that were either extracted from tortured men and women, now dead or ones that reflect the boastful, evasive or exculpatory views of the torturers themselves speaking in their confessions. Without corroboration from other sources, it is impossible to say whether the documents exaggerate or play down what was happening at the prison. My guess is that innumerable random cruelties and hundreds --perhaps thousands-- of instances of torture went unrecorded.What survives in the written record are faint traces of what was going on, hour after hour and day after day.

Torture and violence are so central to S-21 that they need to be addressed. We need to establish the dynamics by which the confessions were extracted. We need to recreate the dramas that were enacted, to penetrate the thinking of the people administering the prison and to understand the rationale they used for torture. Most importantly, as Alexander Hinton has suggested, we need to "rehumanize" the victims by bearing witness to their suffering.

Prisoners at S-21 were dehumanized from the moment they arrived. Blindfolded and shackled, they were bundled out of trucks, usually at night. They were kicked, shoved and beaten as they were taken inside to be documented and photographed. They had as Van Nath said later, in "a place many times worse than hell". The border between beating (vay) and torture (tearunikam) was crossed when weapons, contraptions or humiliating ceremonies were called on, but beatings during interrogation can also be classified as torture and many documents use the terms vay and tearunikam interchangeably. Once an interrogation had begun, outside controls were rare and as Sofsky points out with regard to Gennan concentration camps, the "transition from torture intended to extract a confession to pure, purposeless torture was fluid". The welfare of the prisoners unless they died before confessing, was never a consideration.

Interrogations could be stopped, intensified or interrupted at the whim of the interrogation team leader. The torturer - usually a different person - could resume using his hands, take up a new weapon. If a confession could be obtained largely by beating or merely by asking questions, so much the better. If none emerged after extensive torture, so much the worse. Some prisoners were tortured routinely, on a daily basis. Ten Chan, a survivor, recalls being beaten and occasionally tortured for twenty-six days in a row.The victims of torture often died. Deaths that occurred after a confession had been produced caused little concem to authorities at the prison, but if a prisoner died beforehand, the interrogator was often suspected of sabotage. Several interrogators imprisoned at S-21 confessed to killing prisoners under interrogation and so did two of the guards, but in most cases it is unclear if this crime was the one for which they had been arrested or reflected their own assessment of punishable actions in their recent past. In any case, sadistic emotions occasionally spilled over, as the former guard Son Moeun wrote in his confession:

By the middle of 1977 S-21 was running smoothly. With a year's experience of trial and error, interrogators had become more adept both at "doing politics" and inflicting torture. They certainly had a clearer idea of what kinds of documentation satisfied their superiors, what tortures "worked" and how prisoners and their confessions could expeditiously be "processed". As time went on, interrogations became swifter and most confessions became shorter. Increasingly, confessions were tape-recorded and the transcriptions of confessions were typed. Elaborate summaries were then drawn up to connect confessions, military units, geographical regions and "strings of traitors". How the wholesale bureaucratization of procedures at the prison affected the frequency or intensity of torture, however, is impossible to say, although we know from interviews that torture and beatings continued at a headlong pace in 1977. The photographer Nhem En remembered "lots of screaming, especially at night, when there was no noise in Phnom Penh. The cries were so loud that we could hear them from half a mile away. " In a similar vin, the ex-guard Khieu Lohr told Alexander Hinton: "I could hear screams, but no words. Sometimes everything went quiet," while the former guard Kok Sros, interviewed by Douglas Niven, said he heard people screaming under interrogation "every time I went on duty" and also "whenever a prisoner disobeyed a guard".

The cries of people being tortured were treated as an administrative issue, compromising the secrecy of the prison's operations. "Problem of political education," the senior interrogator Tuy wrote in his notebook: "Sometimes the sound of prisoners being beaten can be heard outside [the prison]."

Interrogators often lost control. The temptation to do so must have been overwhelming when three young men, armed with heavy sticks, whips and with access to an electric current and other devices were locked in a room with a helpless, shackled, supposedly "dangerous" prisoner. Under such conditions, as Wilfred Sofsky has pointed out, "if violence is considered normal in a social collective, it gradually becomes a binding nonn". Ma Meang Keng (alias Rin), a former interrogator, confessed that violence was both a dead end and its own reward, as he recalled a deceptively relaxed conversation with his colleagues:

As this harrowing passage suggests, the balance between torture and politics was often impossible to achieve, especially when the interrogators had so little training in politics or interrogation, so much administrative leeway , so much testosterone and so much experience in combat. "Doing politics" in DK, reversing Clausewitz, amounted to waging war by other means. Like the Red Guards in Mao's China, the interrogators at S-21 had been taught that the Party's "enemies" were to be "smashed" in "storming attacks". They had also been told , by the third ranking cadre in the country, that they were the regime's "life breath". Emerging from bursts of overheated, haphazard training into the comparatively cool, secret and supposedly rational world of S-21, they proceeded to "smash enemies" without hesitation, with their bare hands and a variety of weapons.

The following tortures have been documented in the archive of the prison.

Beatings of prisoners were commonplace, and as the S-21 survivor Ung Pech told David Hawk: "For beating, anything that fell into [the interrogators'] hands was used: different kinds of tree branches, bamboo, whips hurriedly made from electric wire". All the survivors remember being beaten.

Electric shock was administered to prisoners on a daily basis, so commonly that a list of instructions drawn up for all the prisoners included a request not to "scream when electric shocks were applied". The penalty for disobeying an interrogator, said the instructions, could be ten strokes of a whip or "five electric shocks"

Vann Nath's memories of shock were probably typical of what happened to thousands of prisoners at S-21:

[The interrogator tied an electric wire around my handcuffs and connected the other end to my trousers with a safety pin. Then he sat down again.

"Now do you remember? Who collaborated with you to betray [the Organization]?" he asked. I couldn't think of anything to say. He connected the wire to the electric power, plugged it in and shocked me. I passed out. I don't know how many times he shocked me, but when I came to, I could hear a distant voice asking over and over who my connection was. I couldn't get any words out. They shocked me so severely that I collapsed on the floor, my shirt completely drenched with sweat... To this day I don't understand why they arrested me.

Another frequently imposed torture at S-21, was called "paying homage to the image(s) of dog(s)" (sompeah rup chkae or thvay [bongkhum] rup chkae) . When he was asked about this, Vann Nath remembered a drawing of a dog's body with Ho Chi Minh's head, tacked to the wall of an interrogation room and recalled interrogators talking about it

By 1978, an image symbolizing "America" had been added to Ho Chi Minh's. The interrogator's notes to Svang Kum's confession identify the second image as one of Lyndon Johnson:

At first when we came to the interrogation place, after I had asked about her history and asked why the Organization had arrested her, she wept and shouted , saying that her husband was a traitor and that she wasn't a traitor. I applied discipline by making her salute the image of the dogs Ho Chi Minh and Johnson but she refused to salute [them] so I beat her for refusing to tell her story and for not respecting the discipline of saidebal. She gave up hope and began to speak about her secret networks.

Some prisoners, it seemed, began their interrogations before they paid homage by pluckily referring to themselves as "revolutionaries". How was this possible, the interrogators wondered, if they had been arrested.? How could a genuine revolutionary be fettered, numbered and locked up? "Paying homage" was one of many steps in a series of degradations designed to bring prisoners into line with what the Party had decided was their animal status. Their foreign masters (me) were depicted as animals and only animals could pay homage to them. Once the patron - "dogs"' identities and the prisoners' loyalty to them had been displayed, the prisoner was divested of humanity and the interrogation could proceed, majestically or at a fast clip, to unearth "treacherous activities", "plans" and "strings of traitors". The prisoners by that point had become debased, unhealthy, document-producing creatures, tottering on four legs toward their deaths. .

A contradiction in Khmer Rouge thinking that affected the practice of torture at S-21 arose between the notion of "independence-mastery" extolled by the regime and the requirement that followers of the Organization succumb unthinkingly to its requirements. "Independence-mastery" supposedly meant shaking loose from deferential ties to prerevolutionary patrons. The process led to empowerment at the price of personal independence. People were liberated from dependence into the solidarity of the Party. Empowered men and women became instruments of the popular will, which is to say, the servants of the Party. This subtle point was lost on many young recruits, who may have seen permission to torture the Party's "enemies" or "guilty people" not merely as an assignment but as a right. In these cases the violence implicit in their empowerment overrode the constraints imposed by obedience to the often austere directives of the Party. In the heat of the revolution, such "left" deviations, where "enemies" were involved were often ignored by those in power.

The real horror of S-21 may lie outside the violence itself, embedded in the administrators' indifference and the indifference of the Party Center to what they were doing to so many other human beings. In a sense, some of the people who were tortured at Tuol Sleng may have been fortunate not to have survived, if we consider the continuous, traumatic after effects of torture that afflict so many of its victims and which led many survivors of the Nazi concentration camps, for example, to kill themselves long after they had been set free. Similar sad endings awaited many of the people who were humiliated and attacked in the Chinese Cultural Revolution, while perpetrators, as a class, seem to be more thick-skinned. Two examples of such victims may suffice. Jean Amery, a prominent Jewish intellectual in post-war Europe and a survivor of Auschwitz, committed suicide in 1978. His friend and contemporary at Auschwitz, Primo Levi, threw himself out of his own apartment in Turin a decade later. In his eloquent memoir, At the Mind's Limits, Amery may have foreshadowed his own death while describing torture when he wrote: