Bush Does Not Get It (6) Torture: the case for absolute prohibition
President Bush doesn't get it

‘Iraqi detainee Hussein Mutar, in videotaped testimony shown during the sentencing phase, said he had supported the U.S.-led invasion to oust Saddam Hussein until he was abused. "The Americans came to free the Iraqi people from Saddam," Mutar said. "I didn't expect this to happen. This instance changed the entire picture of the American people (for me)."’ (CBS News, January 15 2004, reporting on the trial of US Army Spc. Charles Graner Jr.) See Normblog comments on this piece here

The 2005 Human Rights Watch Annual Report has damned the US record on human rights in Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. The report states, ‘When the United States disregards human rights, it undermines...human rights culture and thus sabotages one of the most important tools for dissuading people from becoming terrorists. Instead the US abuses have provided a new rallying cry for terrorist recruiters and the pictures from Abu Ghraib have become recruiting posters for Terrorism. Inc’.

The executive director of Human Rights Watch, Kenneth Roth, says "This abuse of prisoners is the predictable product of an environment created by a series of policy decisions taken at the highest level of the Bush administration. It is a product of the Bush administration's continuing refusal to end and disown coercive interrogation,"

There is no sign the Bush administration is listening. Condoleeza Rice last week pressured Congress to reverse legislation that had been passed 96-2 in the Senate aimed at imposing restrictions on extreme interrogation methods. Albert Gonzalez, the White House lawyer who was on watch when the guidelines for the interrogation of prisoners were loosened in 2002, is the White House choice for Attorney-General. And reports in the Washington Post last week suggest the Bush team wants to create a network of prison camps in Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Yeman similar to Guantanamo Bay in being US-run and outside the scope of International law.

Labour Friends of Iraq believes the British government should take the lead in arguing for an absolute prohibition on torture on two grounds: pragmatism and principle.

The pragmatic grounds for absolute prohibition are clear. Torture aids the terrorists. Torture allows the terrorists to frame the issues just as they please. It hampers ideological combat against the terrorists. Torture turns the terrorist recruit into the hard-line terrorist militant. This was the case with members of the Muslim Brotherhood tortured by Anwar Sadat in Egypt (one of whom went on to be Bin Laden’s No.2). Torture undermines the democrats in Iraq when those brave people are Iraq’s greatest hope. Torture undermines the fragile UN-backed political process when that process is the sole alternative to the violence. Torture corrupts its perpetrators. It leads to talk of ‘El Salvador’ options (death squads). Torture creates widespread alienation from the transition process when it is the energy and hope of ordinary people, above all else, that is required to secure the transition to democracy.

The argument advanced by such writers as Alan Dershowitz for ‘torture warrants’ to be issued by judges according to the rule of law is wrong not only in principle but on pragmatic grounds. Torture does not ‘work’. It mistakes the kind of war the democrats are engaged in, the nature of the ‘enemy’, the path along which victory lies, and the meaning of ‘victory’ itself.

Michael Ignatieff, in his book ‘The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror’ has suggested that the Dershowitz argument is a slippery slope. ‘Legalisation of physical force in interrogation will hasten the process by which it becomes routine’. Certainly US practices have already taken their toll on the instincts of the British government. Steve Crawshaw, the London Director of Human Rights Watch, told the Guardian newspaper, ‘It was dismaying that it needed a law lords’ judgement to rule that detention without trial was not acceptable in a democracy…It is even more dismaying that the British government seems reluctant to concede this’.

Ignatieff asks us to consider the words of Jean Amery. an Auschwitz survivor, who was a Belgian resistor tortured by the Nazis. In his book At the Minds Limit Amery wrote that torture did not only signal the psychosexual depredations of the individual perpetrator. Amery’s message, says Ignatieff, was that torture was ‘the key to the identity of the society responsible for it’. If we believe Amery is right then we should send Charles Graner to jail but also sack Donald Rumsfeld. We should jail Lindy but also close Guantanamo Bay.

Amery’s idea, according to Ignatieff, tells us why we must insist on an absolute prohibition of torture on grounds of first principle: “[Amery] helps us to see why torture should remain anathema to a liberal democracy and should never be regulated, countenanced, or covertly accepted in a war on terror. For torture, when committed by a state, expresses the state’s ultimate view that human beings are expendable. This view is antithetical to the spirit of any constitutional society whose raison deter is the control of violence and coercion in the name of human dignity and freedom.”

"We should have faith in this constitutional identity. It is all that we have to resist the temptations of nihilism, but it is not nothing. It is the paramount duty of political leaders in a democracy under attack to keep the forces of order intently focused on the political requirement of maintaining legitimacy (..) we are fighting a war whose essential prize is preserving the identity of liberal society itself and preventing it from becoming what terrorists believe it to be. Terrorists seek to strip off the mask of law to reveal the nihilist heart of coercion within, and we have to show ourselves and the populations whose loyalty we seek that the rule of law is not a mask but the true image of our nature”.

Ignatieff is right. We have argued that purely coercive ‘solutions’ in Iraq are a chimera. We need ‘political warfare’: capacity-building the organisations of democratic grassroots Iraq, economic reconstruction on a scale and urgency that would deserve the name ‘Marshall Plan’, a step-change in international community involvement in security, and a fierce commitment to human rights and the rule of law, all to underpin the UN-backed political process which – by the speedy achievement of full Iraqi sovereignty and withdrawal of coalition forces - remains Iraq’s only hope”. (AJ)