Torture

Aug 03, 2009 Editorial

Later this week, the Joint Committee on Human Rights in the British Parliament will report on the allegations of its government’s involvement in and knowledge of the torture of terrorist suspects by foreign powers.

The Obama administration has been dogged by accusations that it has backtracked on its declared commitment to clear up the ambiguities on the use of torture to extract information introduced by the Bush administration.

The fact that there can be this debate on the use of torture in these two exemplars of democratic and open governance highlights the difficulties that have been spawned for law enforcers in the post-9/11 era of terrorists and terrorism.

As laid down in treaties such as the Geneva Conventions, the UN Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the ban on torture or any cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment is absolute, even in times of war.

Along with genocide, torture is the only crime that every state must punish, no matter who commits it or where. However, along with the US and the UK, Amnesty International noted cases of state-sponsored torture or other inhumane treatment in 102 of the 153 countries included in its 2007 report.

Here in Guyana, the accusations of torture to extract information from suspects picked up in the latest alleged act of terrorism – the torching of the Ministry of Health’s Building- by elements of the Disciplined Forces has raised the issue once again.

As in the US and the UK, the local administration has stoutly denied that it condones torture. However, one of its Ministers had spoken of “roughing up” treatment echoing the “enhanced interrogation” techniques that the aforementioned democracies had sought to enforce.

While no country has attempted to justify torture in its full blown robust form – pulling off toenails or drilling their root canals, for instance-the governments such as the US and the UK have attempted to tighten up the definition of the term so as to give their interrogators some leeway, as above, in eliciting information. Does sleep deprivation or sexual humiliation count?

One interesting finding is that surveys in many jurisdictions, including the US and the UK, show that a significant number of their citizens would permit “enhanced interrogation” techniques if they were deployed to stop terroristic activities.

We suspect that if a survey were conducted in Guyana, the findings would be very similar. The catalyst to such thinking, of course, is the clear and present danger many citizens perceive that the activities of terrorists pose to law and order in their societies.

Defenders of the blanket prohibition against torture offer arguments that range from the moral (torture degrades and corrupts the society that allows it) to the practical (people will say anything under torture so the information they provide is unreliable anyway).

They point out that if some “enhanced interrogation” methods are allowed, as occurred with the US troops in Iraq and Guantanemo Bay, there will always be the difficulty of knowing where to draw the line in real life situations. In 1978 the European Court of Human Rights ruled against Britain’s use of such techniques in Northern Ireland.

Two decades later the Israeli Supreme Court overruled regulations that permitted “moderate physical pressure as a last resort”, citing the slippery-slope argument.

One may say that ultimately, torture as a technique to extract information is a failure of rigorous intelligence gathering by the law enforcement agencies. But its continued use by countries with the most widespread and expensive intelligence assets points out the growing sophistication of the forces that are arrayed against the modern state.

Rather than indulging in another round of recriminations, maybe we ought to constitute a commission dominated by individuals with backgrounds in the Disciplined Forces and the law to come up with some workable recommendations to guide both the administration and the hard working troops in the field.

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Torture

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