The perils of torture

At the inauguration of Barrack Obama as US President, his immediate predecessor, George W Bush, cut a forlorn figure. He left office with the lowest popularity rating of any President since opinion polling began. And the excitement about the accession of the first African-American to the White House ran, like an electric current, throughout the world.

Eventually we will have a more comprehensive assessment of the Bush Presidency than that provided by a snapshot of an opinion poll. Historians, when they are allowed access to administration files, currently confidential, and after reflection, will offer a definitive study of how the US was governed during the first decade of the 21st century.

There is, however, at least one document in circulation that gives a damning indictment of how the country strayed from its democratic ideals during the Bush years.

After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack on the US, President Bush authorised eight prisons at American military bases from Thailand and Afghanistan to Morocco, Poland and Romania, wherein up to 100 people ‘disappeared’ for several years. In 2006 he arranged for a transfer of 14 of these prisoners to Guantanamo Bay where officers of the International Red Cross were allowed to meet them. Among the Red Cross duties is to evaluate compliance with the Geneva Convention and to supervise the treatment of prisoners of war.

They interviewed “each of these persons in private” and produced a report that provides “a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention during the period they were held in the CIA detention programme”. These periods ranged from 16 months to four and a half years.

All 14 told of their harrowing experience of CIA interrogation. As they were held, since their detention, in continuous solitary confinement, it is reasonable for us to conclude that they did not collude in fabricating their stories.

Let Abu Zubaydah speak for them. He is a 31-year old Palestinian who was an important figure in the Al Qaeda organisation. He was in charge of its logistics and recruitment sections. He ran training camps for jihadists and placed them in cells.

Arrested in Pakistan in 2002, he sustained life threatening injuries as he sought to evade capture. Nursed back to health by an American military doctor brought to Pakistan for that purpose, he was moved between prisons in Thailand and Afghanistan for questioning by CIA operatives.

He described the early phase of his interrogation thus: “I woke up, naked, strapped to a bed, in a very white room. I am not sure how long I remained in the bed. After some time, I think it was several days, but can’t remember exactly, I was transferred to a chair where I was kept shackled by the hands and feet for what I think was the next two to three weeks. During this time I developed blisters on the underside of my legs due to the constant sitting. I was only allowed to get up from the chair to go to the toilet which consisted of a bucket.

“I was given no solid food during the first two or three weeks, while sitting on the chair. I was only given Ensure, a nutrient supplement, and water to drink. At first the Ensure made me vomit but this became less with time.

“The cell and room were air-conditioned and very cold. Very loud, shouting time music was constantly playing.

“During the first two to three week period I was questioned for about one to two hours daily. I could not sleep at all for the first two to three weeks. If I started to sleep one of the guards would come and spray water on my face.”

Later he was subjected to severe beatings and constant humiliation. They were part of what President Bush coyly called “alternative procedures” that the CIA developed under the authorisation of the US Department of Justice.

The Red Cross report concluded that the “allegations of ill treatment of the detainees indicate that in many cases, the ill treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA programme either singly or in combination, constituted torture.”

The Al Qaeda attack on the US was the greatest threat to US authority since the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour in 1941. Does it matter that the US Government responded, in part, to terrorism with torture? People like Abu Zubaydah almost certainly played a central role in organising the attack that caused thousands of deaths. It is right, obviously, that such people should face justice in an international court of law.

I believe it does matter. Prisoners, suffering torture, may offer false information in the hope that the pain might end. There is evidence that this happened. Also evidence extracted under torture is not admissible in a democratic court of justice. The use of torture deprives a society whose laws have been violated the possibility of applying justice.

More importantly, the use of torture undermines the moral principle of a democratic state. From 2002, through the use of torture, the US clearly violated the Geneva Convention and the Convention Against Torture, as well as US law.

On becoming President, Barrack Obama banned the interrogation techniques allowed under the Bush regime. He said, pithily, that torture “corrodes the character of a country.” In a year dominated by the bad news of economic recession, it is good that moral purpose has been restored to the governance of the most powerful nation on earth.