These days political torture is being much examined in the news: its use by the recently defeated Republican Party team of George Bush, its purposes, its physical effects on those tortured, its success (or lack of same) as an investigative device. Questioning and torture, we have learned, frequently go hand in hand, and Jacobo Timerman knew quite a bit about that.
"Are you a Jew?"
A colonel in the Argentine army asked this question of Timerman, a world-renowned journalist who by 1979 had been incarcerated and systematically tortured by the Argentine government for two and a half years, although charged with no crime. It was the very first question that he was asked by the tribunal of military officers that had finally been formed to enquire of Timerman about his activities as a journalist. It was the first such hearing he had as a prisoner.
Timerman was the founder of the independent Buenos Aires newspaper La Opinión and had long taken the editorial stance that extremism, whether from the Right or the Left, is dangerous to — and dismissive of — the general populace and therefore unacceptable. 
In 1979, a right-wing military junta had been in power in Argentina for more than five years, and the left-wing terrorist gang Los Montoneros had been battling against the junta, using kidnapping, murder and extortion as means to extend that battle. Timerman had savaged both sides equally in his paper.
Timerman was somewhat different from most of the many thousands being tortured by the Argentine military junta, the leader of which was General Jorge Rafael Videla. Timerman was a Jew. "[A torturer] could hate a political prisoner for belonging to the opposite camp,” he wrote, “but one could also try to convince him, turn him around, make him understand his error, switch sides, 
get him to work for you. But how can a Jew be changed? That is hatred: eternal, interminable, perfect, inevitable. Always inevitable."
So Timerman was in the position of being deemed worthy of torture for his political views, although in the end it was not those views that had actually brought him to that point in his life. It was his birth, and the cultural weight that a Jew must always bear simply because he is a Jew. In the end, Timerman believed, his political views were really just the excuse for his arrest. It was his being a Jew that was his real crime. This in a country that has an enormous Jewish population, second in the New World only to that of the United States.
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