Dear Editor,
In a recent discourse (‘Torture and Accountability: where does President Obama go from here?’ (LSE Ideas: 3/11/09), Karen Greenberg (of the ‘Torture Papers’ (2005) fame) and Professor Philippe Sands argued that there should be no discourse about the efficacy of torture. Torture is bad, period. It does not represent what we are and what we stand for as human beings. It does not constitute something that we would tolerate happening to those close to us or to ourselves under any circumstances. Morality and torture are utterly antithetical.
From a socio-political standpoint, after spending years studying the history of torture, Rejali Darius (‘A Painful History,’ Chronicle of Higher Education, 2008) wrote: “Torture represents a powerful danger to democracies. It creates conditions in which one human being gains absolute power over another, and democrats know that no society can tolerate giving anyone that power, legally or tacitly, without setting loose corruption. Torture destroys the lives of victims and torturers alike, and it sets into motion powerful corrupting forces that destroy the judicial, intelligence, and military institutions that use it. Entire organizations can operate as a state within a state, unaccountable to democratic oversight. When that happens, the slide to authoritarianism is almost inevitable.”
Now that the dust hasn’t settled and most sensible people have condemned the torture of the fourteen-year-old and possibly torture in general, allow me to make a few comments on the dynamics of torture and what is required to prevent it.
According to Darius, to adequately protect ourselves against torture, we firstly need to understand that it has supply and demand sides. I will not concern myself here with the supply side, although in the above discourse Professor Sands told an interesting story of how the torture techniques approved by the Bush regime for use at Guantánamo migrated to Iraq and then Afghanistan.
On the demand side, Darius claimed that a major rationale for torture in democracies is usually the government’s claim that a “national security threat” exists. In the above discourse, Greenberg stated that since torture is illegal, amoral and against everything America claims it stands for, she believed that after the publication of her book, which provided graphic evidence of what was taking place at Guantánamo, torture would simply have stopped. Not only did it not stop however but elaborate justifications were concocted and even after all the additional evidence that has since come to light, former Vice-President Dick Cheney is still attempting to defend what took place on grounds of “national security.” Perhaps it is upon similar grounds that while we now rail against the torture of a fourteen-year-old, many of us nevertheless still support the activities of phantom groups that committed all manner of atrocities, including torture.
After what your editorial called ‘The Wednesday Blitz’ (9.11.09), the government claimed that Guyana faces an internal national security problem. I hope that you are wrong in your apparent suggestion that what occurred may well be just another of those remarkable “deflecting incidents” and am, for the moment at least, prepared to accept the government’s position. As a country, we have not had the political will to address the festering political difficulty that underlies our major national security problems and thus the demand for quick answers when events such as last Wednesday’s occur will, more likely than not, lead to the continued use of these kinds of techniques. Furthermore, although it is generally believed that the police have historically depended on levels of coercion to acquire confessions, it now appears that the psychology associated with the use of the now “enhanced interrogation techniques” to deal with the national security problems have migrated to normal policing.
Also on the demand side, when business people are targeted by criminals and governments encourage self-protection measures, torture can result from local arrangements between the police and such people. A permissive environment is also created where the population and judicial system place great value on confessions, especially if suspects are kept in police custody for long periods. However, where this occurs we would normally expect the government to respond by attempting to bring rogue security officials to swift justice.
Darius tells us that if there is a prospect of a world without torture it lies ultimately with public monitoring. He believes that human-rights monitoring does work and is the key for preventing torture but that “when governments, knowingly or not, create a demand for torture, monitoring can drive torturers to be cleaner. That is why political literacy in torture matters and… internal monitoring, sharp punishments for rule breakers and better protection for whistle-blowers can end most organized torture.” This is one of the reasons why we should regret the cancellation of the holistic British security sector project that sought to institutionalise these kinds of elements.
There are also now serious international efforts to contain the use of torture. A Spanish court is considering opening a criminal investigation against six Bush administration officials, including a former Attorney General, for violating international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo. The case is based on the Geneva Conventions and the 1984 Convention against Torture, which is binding on 145 countries including Spain and the United States, and gives them the authority to investigate torture cases, especially when a citizen has been abused. And as Sands told his audience, not only can these people not leave the US for fear of a Pinochet-type arrest but they appear unable to find comparable work in the United States.
Yours faithfully,
Henry B Jeffrey