No more CIA torture: mediaeval cruelty belongs to the Islamists.
Today's Times (15.12.14) carries a piece by the socially conservative journalist, Melanie Phillips, entitled, "A painful truth: ‘torture’ can be morally right," with the strapline, “There are moments when, to save innocent life, you may have to dole out rough treatment.” The piece refers to the Report of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which censured the CIA for the brutal treatment inflicted upon detainees in the years 2001- 2006, and which was referred to by government officials as “enhanced interrogation techniques”.
Mrs Phillips makes a number of points in her article, such as the fact that the Republicans published a “106-page minority report listing example after example of the Democrats’ sloppiness, exaggeration and politicised cherry-picking,” and that the minority report criticised the Democrats for making errors in presenting “ambiguous or unsupported allegations as fact.” Furthermore, the Republicans claimed that “the decision not to interview key witnesses [...] led to significant analytical and factual errors,” and they challenged the Democrats’ claim that “aggressive interrogation yielded only false or no information,” as well as the flawed methodology used to produce the report, “which excluded information gathered by aggressive interrogation that corroborated or clarified scraps of previously obtained but unappreciated intelligence.” (Quotations are from Mrs Phillips’s article.)
Mrs Phillips makes a number of points in her article, such as the fact that the Republicans published a “106-page minority report listing example after example of the Democrats’ sloppiness, exaggeration and politicised cherry-picking,” and that the minority report criticised the Democrats for making errors in presenting “ambiguous or unsupported allegations as fact.” Furthermore, the Republicans claimed that “the decision not to interview key witnesses [...] led to significant analytical and factual errors,” and they challenged the Democrats’ claim that “aggressive interrogation yielded only false or no information,” as well as the flawed methodology used to produce the report, “which excluded information gathered by aggressive interrogation that corroborated or clarified scraps of previously obtained but unappreciated intelligence.” (Quotations are from Mrs Phillips’s article.)
I would not be at all surprised if there were some truth, or even a great deal of truth, in the above objections presented in the Republicans’ minority report. However, even if these “enhanced interrogation techniques” did lead to useful information that resulted in the capture of terrorists and the prevention of planned terrorist acts, the two most salient questions are, “When do ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ become torture,” and “Can torture ever be justified, even when it prevents the suffering and deaths of the innocent?”
In her article, Mrs Phillips defends the actions of the CIA and the interrogation techniques for which they are censured by the Senate Select Committee Report. However, she does not refer to the techniques as “torture”, and when she does refer to “torture” in her piece in respect of the interrogations, she muffles the term in inverted commas. No. Instead of “torture”, the techniques were merely “rough treatment,” "aggressive interrogation" and "limited ill-treatment," according to Mrs Phillips. It was a long time ago that I read George Orwell’s 1984, but let me try that one with the word “murder”: perhaps “co-human neutralisation” will hit the mark?
The interrogation technique used by the CIA that I regard as most repulsive is so-called “waterboarding”. If you would like to see a short demonstration of what Mrs Phillips is condoning, here is one carried out on a US Army Veteran and activist who volunteered to be waterboarded on the campus of Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana. The waterboarding to which he was subjected is very mild and controlled compared to that inflicted on Guantanamo detainees.
By no stretch of the imagination am I a bleeding-heart, woolly liberal on issues of defence, national security, or the West using its military might to challenge Islamofascist states, which represent one of the greatest human evils on our planet. However, torture is unacceptable in any circumstances. Even if it were an effective means of obtaining information, which is highly questionable, it is always morally wrong. As much as I agree with most of what Melanie Phillips writes about the threat of Islamism, the vilification of Israel, the threat of a nuclear Iran, and the wretched attitude of appeasement towards religiofascist states and agitators, it is when I read pieces such as the one published today, and those that reveal her irrational, blinkered and deeply-entrenched homophobia, that I seriously wonder whether Mrs Phillips's human empathy and compassion genes have suffered some kind of fatal and irreparable malfunction, if indeed they have ever featured on her DNA at all.
Throughout history, those who have sanctioned or carried out torture have believed they were justified in doing so, whether that justification derived from a belief in the rightful supremacy of a certain religion, of a certain political ideology, of a specific dictator, or of a specific moral code. Whoever carries out judicial torture, whether in the USA or in ISIL, whether today or tomorrow, will always be all too able and eager to provide a similar, eloquent justification for their unconscionable actions, and their conviction of moral justification for doing so will be no less deeply felt than that of anyone who supports the views Mrs Phillips has expressed.
The crucial thing about drawing a red line where torture is concerned, and declaring it to be evil, inhuman and utterly unacceptable in any circumstances, is that this approach pulls the rug out from absolutely everyone who might be convinced their own reason for torturing is legitimate because it is exceptional. The grey area that apologists for CIA torture are trying to create is one that will increasingly be filled across the globe by the most abject and unimaginable human misery at the hands of those who are delusionally convinced they inhabit the moral high ground.
If we start to justify torture in certain circumstances, even by prettifying it with the euphemisms ““rough treatment,” "aggressive interrogation" and "limited ill-treatment" in the tradition of Orwellian Doublespeak that redefines “X” as “not-X” for the purpose of winning an argument, then we open very dangerous floodgates. Any despot or sadist, any fundamentalist religiofascist, any political tyrant, will be able to craft a justification along the same lines. It doesn't need to be a credible one. It just needs to be clever, so that he can claim to have a case that is comparable to that of the CIA torturers, and argue vehemently for its legitimacy. That will lead to more torture of the innocent, of those who dare to protest against tyranny, as well as of the guilty.
At the moment, there is a great deal of consensus globally that torture is always wrong. It is not a universal consensus by any means, but it has still created a degree of taboo that leads most repressive states to deny that they are carrying it out, rather than to admit to or advertise it brazenly. Progressive states are also capable of imposing, and sometimes willing to impose, sanctions for such human rights abuses. That developing consensus is based on a prohibition of torture under any circumstances.
If progressive states open a loophole through which to pass electrodes and burning irons, then this developing consensus will be undermined.
A further salient factor that needs to be considered is that if a Western state engaged in the War on Terror tortures Islamist and suspected Islamist detainees, not only does that State lose its moral authority by doing so: it also encourages Islamists to treat Western detainees they capture in battle, or kindnap, in the same way. There is therefore a potential causal relationship between the USA torturing a detainee in Guantanamo Bay, and as US or UK hostage or captive being tortured by Islamists in retaliation. In October 2014, John Cantlie, who was kidnapped by ISIL and is still in captivity, reported that ISIL had waterboarded captives who had tried to escape: "Some of us who tried to escape were waterboarded by our captors, as Muslim prisoners are waterboarded by their American captors." There is the theoretical possibility that this statement was made under duress; though given the ruthlessness of his captors, if the idea had entered their minds at all, it would be hardly surprising if they had carried out this atrocity, as reported.
As well as encouraging Islamofascist militants to torture captives and hostages, the very fact that the USA is seen to be carrying out torture does nothing but fire up the hatred of the West in Islamofascist states and subcultures, and it shores up the propaganda that is being peddled by Islamist preachers and recruiting sergeants.
A further salient factor that needs to be considered is that if a Western state engaged in the War on Terror tortures Islamist and suspected Islamist detainees, not only does that State lose its moral authority by doing so: it also encourages Islamists to treat Western detainees they capture in battle, or kindnap, in the same way. There is therefore a potential causal relationship between the USA torturing a detainee in Guantanamo Bay, and as US or UK hostage or captive being tortured by Islamists in retaliation. In October 2014, John Cantlie, who was kidnapped by ISIL and is still in captivity, reported that ISIL had waterboarded captives who had tried to escape: "Some of us who tried to escape were waterboarded by our captors, as Muslim prisoners are waterboarded by their American captors." There is the theoretical possibility that this statement was made under duress; though given the ruthlessness of his captors, if the idea had entered their minds at all, it would be hardly surprising if they had carried out this atrocity, as reported.
As well as encouraging Islamofascist militants to torture captives and hostages, the very fact that the USA is seen to be carrying out torture does nothing but fire up the hatred of the West in Islamofascist states and subcultures, and it shores up the propaganda that is being peddled by Islamist preachers and recruiting sergeants.
Mrs Phillips presents the case for justifying torture in some circumstances – yes, waterboarding is still torture, Melanie Phillips, and even if you were Chief Wordsmith at the Ministry for Truth, it would still be torture. But if torture has compelling merit as a means to a very important end, then why should torture be restricted to unlawful combatants? Why should it not be legitimised in the UK's legal system in general if a detainee is withholding information whose non-disclosure could lead to the deaths of many people? And how many people would need to be under threat of murder for it to be justified? What if it were only one person? Would that one person's life not be worth saving by means of torturing someone with essential information? Why not torture the mother of a serial killer who is on the run, and who is likely to kill more people, if the police are convinced she knows where he is?
This is surely not the kind of society that decent, compassionate people want to live in. It is an Orwellian nightmare. If the West compromises its values to this appalling degree as a result of the War on Terror, then the Islamists will have succeeded in destroying the beautiful and compassionate values of our liberal nations that they hate so much, as well as our aspiration as civilised people to become even better than we are. They will have been victorious in delivering us to the world of the Middle Ages in which they still wallow.
At the end of her article, Mrs Phillips writes, “Our enemies are laughing at the Senate report." I think not. Islamists thrive on demonising the USA. It is their lifeblood. They are therefore hardly likely to welcome a report from a large group of the USA's most senior politicians that opposes cruelty towards and maltreatment of Islamist detainees (and of those innocent people who are merely suspected of belonging to this category). On the contrary: such a report, based on the fundamental Western values of compassion, justice and human decency, completely undermines the hateful, toxic Islamist propaganda that fuels the zealous fury and hatred of successive generations indoctrinated into a cruel religiofascist ideology, and exposes as false its warped blanket misrepresentation of Western people and Western values.
Living up to the cruel identity that the Islamists are trying to impose on us does nothing but play into their hands, and into the hands of their recruiting sergeants. Islamists may choose to remain in the Middle Ages. We must not join them there.
© Gary Powell, 2014
This blogpost is based on comments I made today on the Times Online under Melanie Phillips’s article.
