Dossier on torture and prison conditons in Italy 1979-1983 - CARII

With thanks to Arlen Austin for making the scan available.

Contents

• Testimonies on Torture p2
• Statements by Jurists, Politicians and Police p21
• Prison Conditions p38

Introduction

The following dossier is a collection of documents, testimonials and articles on the use of torture by the police and the conditions in the political prisons of Italy. They cover the period between 1979 through the present, the spring of 1983. Since they originate from witnesses of, participants in and objects of the torture and incarceration, they speak for themselves. However, they should be of even greater interest to the United States public for two reasons.

First, the use of torture peaked during the Gen. Dozier kidnapping episode when the "imperatives of information gathering", given the general's role in the placing of Cruise missiles in Italy, apparently "justified" for some authorities the state brutality documented in these pages. This illustrates one of the main social consequences of the "nuclearization" of the European military: the inevitable ability of governments to transform any "incident" into a "maximum national emergency" with all its consequent deterioration of basic human rights (including habeus corpus and even the physiological integrity of suspects).

Second, the ability to create a parallel legal and penal system to deal with political dissidents employing methods that with full justification could be called "Stalinist", "MaCarthyite" or even "Nazi" is ostensibly democratic (or even social democratic) society is an important development not only in Italy. It is increasingly becoming a political reality throughout Europe (especially in the U.K. and West Germany). This parallel state creates a political schizophrenia so that the most patent violations to human rights can appear to be "outside" of normal civility and so to be overlooked by the "average citizen". Indeed, interest in these violations: can be taken as evidence for having a "dissident status" in the first place.

If the typical US reader believes that these are just European matters we must plainly tell him or her, "De to fabula narratur!" CARI hopes that the information in this dossier, which barely reaches the Italian public (as the article on "Prisons and Disinformation", pp.39-43. shows) much less the English-speaking world, will be a basis of an informed international protest andresponse to the violations of civil rights in Italy.