IN SAN GIMIGNANO, when the tourist tires of all that piazza and vista stuff, she can always take a break and go and visit the museum of torture. Inside the pleasant medieval town-house are exhibited all kinds of devices that you will have heard of — the rack, the thumbscrew, the iron maiden; and quite a few that you haven’t, though most of those are just for gouging various body parts. The recent interest in the reigns of the Tudors and the quatercentenary of the Gunpowder Plot have reminded us of how recently, and with what skill, some of these implements were deployed on behalf of the English State.
It’s good to know, then, that CIA planes are not landing and taking off every few minutes from British airfields, carrying shivering human cargo destined to be treated to the modern versions of the San Gimignano horrors. Condi Rice has told us that it isn’t so, that the US abides by international laws on the banning of torture, and that Americans would never tolerate such abuse.
And for all the X-Files talk of “black sites” and the suggestion on yesterday’s Thought For The Day that the CIA Cessnas are stuffed with pre- torture passengers, there is very little evidence to contradict Condi’s reassurances. The pressure group Liberty admits that its actions in calling for more information are based on the need to ensure that nothing bad is happening, rather than direct knowledge that evil is actually being committed.
The Washington Post’s original story on “black sites” has some 20-30 suspects being held by the US in secure places outside America, including a number widely believed by the international community to be leading al-Qaeda men. The recent much-discussed report in the German magazine Der Spiegel logged 437 CIA flights over a two-year period and speculated that “such planes could be used to transfer presumed terrorists and place them in secret locations”. But unless the Americans moved the score or so of detainees around a lot just for the hell of it, it seems likely that the vast majority of the flights were for other purposes.
There we go, just another scare, let’s get back to defeating terrorism, shall we? If only. Here are some of the reasons for thinking that we can’t just let this one go, no matter how much we may admire or want to believe Dr Rice. The first is that we know of instances where suspects — men such as the senior al-Qaeda operative Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi — were taken to countries such as Egypt for interrogation. Amnesty has taken up the case of two Yemenis who were interrogated and tortured by Jordanian security forces for four days during an 18-month period of detention by US forces.
And the second is that we cannot be sure that what we in Britain might mean by torture is what a CIA interrogator handling a terrorist suspect means by torture. The UN Convention of 1985 stipulates that no circumstance of any kind “may be invoked as a justification of torture”, which is defined by it as “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person”. Sleep deprivation, therefore, counts as torture, as does being forced to assume an uncomfortable position for hours on end, as would humiliation designed to cause suffering.
So when Vice-President Dick Cheney, not long after 9/11, spoke of the need to work with “the dark side, if you will”, what was he talking about? For a brief period in 2002 the Defence Department of Defence authorised techniques including prolonged standing, hooding, the manipulation of phobias to cause stress, the removal of clothing and sensory deprivation. Even when these methods were then removed from the official approval list, they were still permitted in theory upon application to the Secretary of Defence.
It was to stop this from happening that the Republican senator John McCain introduced his amendment to a Bill this autumn, stating that the use of “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” on enemy combatants should be prohibited. The Senate voted 90-9 for McCain’s proposal. The White House, however, threatened to veto it and some Republicans began to seek a exemption for the CIA. In so doing they exposed the nature of the argument to public view, almost for the first time.
McCain argued first from a position of deep principle. But also, as a former prisoner of war himself (of the North Vietnamese) he believes that torture does not work. “In my experience,” he wrote a few weeks ago, “abuse of prisoners often produces bad intelligence because under torture a person will say anything he thinks his captors want to hear — whether it is true or false.”
Since then it has been fascinating to see coming to the surface what have previously been subterranean arguments in favour of abuse. There has, of course, been the “ticking bomb” scenario, in which someone has 24 hours to save an American city from annihilation and only a suspect and a pair of nutcrackers to do it with. But there has also been a greater willingness on the part of some Americans to shed the usual hypocrisy or evasive language and argue for torture.
One newspaper pointed out that McCain himself had collapsed after four days of beatings at the “Hanoi Hilton” and signed a war crimes confession. “That McCain broke under torture doesn’t make him any less of an American hero,” said the paper, “but it does prove he’s wrong to claim that harsh interrogation techniques simply don’t work.” Newsweek reported the views recently of Senator Kit Bond, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who cited the case of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, who revealed a planned second wave of attacks, but only after the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
This belief explains why methods used on one prisoner at Guantanamo Bay included him being forced to act a like a dog, being forced to simulate sex with a female interrogator, being forced to wear a bra, and being confronted by an unleashed dog.
And you can see that it could sometimes be true that torture gets results. For every ten duff confessions you might get a really useful admission, just as for every five detainees you might be holding one very dangerous terrorist. Who knows? You won’t find, I would suggest, anywhere in history a torturer — deploying any of the San Gimignano devices — who didn’t think that he was doing it for the best.
Good old-fashioned disastrous realpolitik would suggest that we turn aside while torture happens. If, in the short term, we have a chance of extracting a few key names, places and plans, then lives may be saved and we should let the renderers rend. It is precisely the same logic that led to us trade smiles and Sandhurst places with Middle Eastern dictators for years. It seemed more politic for us to support our bastards — and never mind the democracy.
But as McCain puts it now, we are in “a war of ideas, a struggle to advance freedom in the face of terror in places where oppressive rule has bred the malevolence that creates terrorists”. And we fight it — always, always, always — by being as little like those oppressors as we can possibly be. Even if torture works.
david.aaronovitch@thetimes.co.uk
