America's shame

Locking someone with a phobia of insects in a small box, and then throwing in an insect - which you say can and will bite them.

The newly released and declassified torture memos show how US government lawyers advised the Bush administration that this did not qualify as torture: just as the use of stress positions, sleep deprivation and waterboarding didn't.

Andrew Sullivan is excellent on this, as he has been throughout. The rightwing American blogosphere, by contrast, is either silent or shrill. The continuing use by some commentators of the wholly discredited and Orwellian term 'enhanced interrogation techniques' is chilling. As Sullivan says, if Iran captured some US sailors and locked them in a small box for days on end and then waterboarded them in an attempt to get intelligence from them, do you think that the American right would be denying that they had been tortured?

Sullivan's caption for the photo above is

a torture victim murdered while being beaten in a stress position by a masked US agent at Abu Ghraib.

Did you ever imagine you'd read such a sentence?

UK complicity in torture

There's been a lot of talk, falling out of the case of Binyam Mohamed, about 'complicity in torture'. But what does that mean? I suggest it's all a bit murky.

Let's pretend Country X has captured a man, AB. AB is a suspected terrorist, and thought to be well placed within a significant terrorist organisation.* Country X comes to the UK and says, 'We have captured AB. We are going to question him. We are willing to share the intelligence from that interrogation with you. Would you like us to put any particular questions to him?'

Now, we know that Country X has a poor human rights record. It is likely that AB will be mistreated during his interrogation. It is possible that mistreatment will qualify as torture.

We also know that AB may have information that if we had it would lead, directly or indirectly, to innocent British lives being saved. In any event, it's pretty much a dead cert that he can provide exceptionally valuable intelligence, and this is a very rare opportunity to get it.

We also know that Country X is going to interrogate him whether we ask for questions to put to him or not.

So we say to Country X, 'Ok, thanks, but the UK does not torture and does not condone torture. Do you promise not to mistreat AB during his questioning?'

And Country X replies 'We don't torture! And of course we won't mistreat AB'.

We doubt whether Country X's assurance is worth much. But it might be.

Is the UK complicit in torture and at moral fault if we take up Country X's offer to put some questions to AB, and it turns out he was tortured during the interrogation?

*I'm not suggesting that this applies to Binyam Mohamed.

No torture pardons

As others have pointed out, Bush did not, as widely expected, issue pardons to those involved in America's torture - sorry, "enhanced interrogation" - programme. As a Bush official has admitted that at least one suspect, "2oth hijacker" Qathani, was subject to torture, this leaves things potentially very interesting, though sadly it is hard to imagine Obama expending political capital on prosecutions.

Of all the terrible things the Bush administration did, the embrace of torture was surely among the very worst.

Btw - "President Obama". Doesn't it feel good to type and say those words?

McCain and torture

Just in case you missed it - Andrew Sullivan made the excellent point a couple of weeks ago that John 'subject-verb-PoW' McCain was not tortured as a PoW according to the bastardised Bush definition of torture. What he went through was just the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, or whatever Orwell-esque phrase is currently in vogue in Bushland. And, to add an extra seasoning of irony, Sullivan claims that in supporting the Military Commissions Act, McCain acquiesced in CIA use of these same techniques against terror suspects. "And so the tortured became the enabler of torture."

Sullivan has been great on the torture point. Putting aside the moral obscenity of it all,  its sanctioning at the top of the administration has been surely one of the most catastrophic global political mistakes of the Bush presidency, up there with Rumsfield and the DoD running roughshod over the careful work of the State Department in relation to war- and post=war planning Iraq.