 "Why are the liberals always on the other side?" asks the fictional French military commander Colonel Mathieu when he is challenged, in The Battle for Algiers, for using torture to fight terror.
| Because liberals are unwilling to face the consequences of having to fight for their freedom? |
The film suggests that torture works as a tool of immediate necessity, even if the consequences are a blurring of morality and so final defeat.
| The film suggests that torture + incompetence + murder leads to defeat. I don't condone torture at all. I condone losing my life to murderous barbarians even less. |
Four decades on, Mathieu's charge against liberal scruples is still being raised, implicit in the defence of the means being used in a modern battle against Islamic terror.
| Particularly when those scruples are wielded by 'progressives' who wouldn't have any problems torturing Dick Cheney. Let's be clear, the progressives today aren't unhappy that torture is being used, they're unhappy because the 'wrong' people are being tortured. |
Old conventions and legal obligations are being portrayed as obstacles to victory in a conflict, it is said, whose scope and severity are being recklessly misunderstood. Without supporting torture, the prime minister crystalised this thinking when he asserted last year that"the rules of the game have changed". John Reid's urgent demeanour has done it again in the past week.
Mark Bowden, writing in the Atlantic, give the topic the gravity it deserves ('The Dark Art of Interrogation'):
The Bush Administration has adopted exactly the right posture on the matter. Candor and consistency are not always public virtues. Torture is a crime against humanity, but coercion is an issue that is rightly handled with a wink, or even a touch of hypocrisy; it should be banned but also quietly practiced. Those who protest coercive methods will exaggerate their horrors, which is good: it generates a useful climate of fear. It is wise of the President to reiterate U.S. support for international agreements banning torture, and it is wise for American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods work. It is also smart not to discuss the matter with anyone. |
Counter-terrorism and justice do not always march in step and nor is the easy response, that justice must always come first, enough of an answer. The dilemmas are more acute. The arrest of 24 suspects in connection with an alleged plot to destroy airliners over the Atlantic may have been a triumph of intelligence and policing that saved many lives. No government could be criticised for acting when it did, on the information it claims to have had. Nor have legal safeguards been broken here. Yet safeguards in other countries are less rigorous. At what point do actions abroad pollute British justice, even if in the short-term they may protect British security?
| As Mr. Bowden says, if the perps in Pakistan were made cold, uncomfortable and alone, that's fine -- wink wink, nod nod, and nice job. If they had their fingernails pulled out then the interrogators have to be punished. |
Reports from Pakistan suggest that much of the intelligence that led to the raids came from that country and that some of it may have been obtained in ways entirely unacceptable here. In particular Rashid Rauf, a British citizen said to be a prime source of information leading to last week's arrests, has been held without access to full consular or legal assistance.
| Wink. Wink. Nod. Nod. It isn't hard. |
Disturbing reports in Pakistani papers that he had "broken" under interrogation have been echoed by local human rights bodies. The Guardian has quoted one, Asma Jehangir, of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, who has no doubt about the meaning of broken. "I don't deduce, I know - torture," she said. "There is simply no doubt about that, no doubt at all."
| One person's 'opinion' being elevated to fact. |
If this is shown to be the case, the prospect of securing convictions in this country on his evidence will be complicated. In 2004 the Court of Appeal ruled - feebly - that evidence obtained using torture would be admissable as long as Britain had not "procured or connived" at it. The law lords rightly dismissed this in December last year, though they disagreed about whether the bar should be the simple "risk" or "probability" of torture.
| The law lords may well need a second dollop of the hand lotion. |
But none of this stops governments acquiescing in torture to acquire information, rather than secure convictions, as British as well as American practice has shown. It has been outsourced to less squeamish countries and denied through redefinition: but it is still torture and still illegal. The former British ambassador to Uzbekistan has provided disturbing evidence of the uneasy boundary between benefiting from torture and encouraging it; so did the Council of Europe's report on rendition in June. | The British didn't send Rashid Rauf to Pakistan to be 'questioned'. He flew there himself, so the rendition argument doesn't fly. |
The defence, to the extent that anything other than evasion has been offered, is no better than the one provided by Colonel Mathieu in Algiers: it works. But does it? Torture and other illegality can offer authorities a short-term seduction, perhaps even temporary successes. Information provided by torture may have helped foil the alleged airliners plot.
| Which is why a reasonable, intelligent people interested in preserving the lives of their citizens find coercion -- the 'other illegality' -- distasteful but occasionally necessary. |
But evidence provided uder torture is often unreliable, sometimes disastrously so - and its use always pollutes the broader credentials of torturers and their allies.
| Which is why, perhaps, the perps need not be brought to trial. |
This battle must be won within the law. Anything else is not just a form of defeat but will in the end fuel the flames of the terror it aims to overcome.
You can't convict them because you can't or won't use the evidence at hand. Even if you convict them you'll not sentence them to a term longer than (at most) ten years. Or you'll release them when the Lions of Islam™ snatch a citizen of yours. Hezbollah and Hamas have been counting on exactly this by capturing Israeli soldiers. Don't think for a moment al-Qaeda wouldn't stoop to grabbing a British citizen if they thought it would get their people released.
So you have some hard decisions to make. You can try them. You can change your law and use tribunals. You can learn to wink. Or you can wring your hands and allow terrorism to ruin your country, whether all at once or corrosively over time.
I'll make one suggestion: if you can't try them and won't keep them, just release them. In the wild. Somewhere quiet. Out of the way. And let us know when and where. |
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