Is Sleep Deprivation Really Torture?

AndrewG

Damn straight.

Fergus Pickering

During the war Colonel l'Oreste-Pinto used to keep German Officers standing up until they pissed themselves in front of their men. He did thia quite deliberately in orderto getv the information he required and it worked. Was this torture? Well, in a sense it was. And, in a sense, so is sleep-deprivation. But I should think shsrp bamboo up your arse, a method preferred by the Chinese, or rack and thumbscrew, are somehow different, possibly worse. What about administering of hallucinogenic drugs. And do you think torture OF ANY SORT is ever justified? I think the only answer to that is of course it is. The same is obviously true of execution. Or so I think. Do I think the Yanks went too far. Yes, I think I do. But I may be wrong, not being in full possession of the facts. Would I torture the man who killed (hypothetically I am glad to say) my daughter if I had the opportunity to do so. You betcha life I would. Which puts me on the side of the man with the cricket bat. I am on his side.

Austin Barry

Yes, let's accept that sleep deprivation is torture. But it's an ugly world and if sleep deprivation and water-boarding is what it takes to extract information from a the shoe bomber, the Y-front bomber or any other bomber, or suspected bomber, you know what? I don't care.

Bunnykins

Is sleep deprivation torture? Just ask any mother with small children.

Ross

"Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, dreadful and guilty man though he be, "confessed" to "plots" to assassinate Jimmy Carter and Pope John Paul II for crying out loud."

It is pretty much beyond dispute that KSM was behind a plot to assassinate the Pope in 1995 and possibly another one in 1999 so I don't see why you are holding that up as an example of how ridiculous confessions under torture are.

Arthur

Agree with pretty much everything here but towards the end you say: 'Which makes it disgraceful and abhorrent that we treat our prisoners in such a way.'

No we do not. And this is the problem. You and many other commentators are jumping through hoops to accept the criminals branding of us as torturers and beyond the pale. You seem not to understand that we are being wrapped up by our enemies and they know it. The sad thing is that we do not know it and we are loosing the propaganda campaign.

Meanwhile, when is this man's leave to remain in the UK being revoked for using a false British passport? Ah, that's right. It is not. And the slow burn war goes on...

IRCT

Thanks for the good article. It addresses an important challenge of the fight against torture.

We invite Massie and all the interested to join the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims (IRCT) community on Facebook, where this article and others are shared and discussed.

Kind regards

Kennybhoy

Jakob von Metzler

Jez

It depends who it's happening to, in the eyes of the liberal anyway.

Pete

To Fergus Pickering

You would justify torture or execution as revenge against someone who killed your daughter?

Remember. 9/11 was a revenge attack against the US for their complicity in many deaths in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere around the world. Many thousands of innocent sons and daughters were killed in 9/11

Iraq was a revenge attack by America, which killed many hundreds and thousands of innocent Iraqi sons and daughters.

And so many thousands more want revenge. And more revenge. And more revenge. And they don't care who they hurt or kill in taking that revenge.

War, Torture, Execution and Terrorism are all one and the same. Because too many people like you, are happy to allow them to happen. And then one day, when it's you who is being tortured, or blown up, or executed, you'll wonder why it's happening and what exactly you did wrong. This is something that people on both sides of the conflict wonder. You and Binyam Mohammed have more in common than you may think.

In fact, you have more in common with him, than either of you do with the political war masters on either side of the line, who never will be punished.

Oh, and Torture never works, it just makes the torturer feel better. It's called Sadism.

Austin Barry

Actually, Pete, torture does work.

Fergus Pickering

Why do liberals never read what conservatives write? I did not say I would justify someone else torturing the murderer of my daughter. I said I would do it. That, my dear sir, is quite a different thing and I said it to make a quite different point. Oh, and where did you get the quaint idea that torture does not work? Of course it works. That does not justify it. But it does work. In your world I suspect that everybody who does not agree with you about pretty well anything is a sadist or something jolly nasty. That is just playground name-calling, eh shithead.

Beer Moth

Pete.

"Remember. 9/11 was a revenge attack against the US for their complicity in many deaths in the Middle East, Africa and elsewhere around the world."

As the leading power of that same west that thrived subsequent to the lifting of the seige of Vienna, 9/11 was going to come down on the US, whatever it did.

A revenge on people who had the audacity to stand up to Islamic imperialism.

ndm

Another great post, Alex. Unlike some of the more depraved commentators, I fail to see why a Conservative reaction to what remains a relatively small problem entails the abandonment of laws regarding the torture of people who have never been charged let alone found guilty of anything.

Nick Cohen exemplifies this barbarism in his most recent Observor column where he writes:

-- Most of today's assumptions about human rights in wartime rest on the dangerous belief that they entail no risks. Writers on torture insist that it "does not work", as if the argument against torture depended on its efficacy, and as if the case for torture could be made if a torturer proved in an experiment on unwilling victims that it could be remarkably persuasive.

This is utter baloney. Anyone who cares about human rights knows full well that providing human rights to someone entails a marginal risk but that is the price we must pay to live in a civilized society, to live within civilization. A price Nick Cohen appears unwilling to pay.

Those of us who choose to remain within the bounds of civilized society even as we fight the evil attacking it know that the true enemy of civilization is not some ruffian skulking round a cave in Afghanistan but those who use that ruffian as an excuse to abandon the hard-won rights of our civilization. Our real enemies are those phony intellectualls who pushed for an abandoment of the war in Afghanistan and a refocussing of attention to Iraq in a war that went on to kill in five years probably as many Iraqis as Saddam Hussein had managed to kill in three decades. And they are those war mongers who decry as anti-American anyone who disagrees with their position on the abuse of war and torture by the United States. And they are those nationalists/racists who slander as anti-Semitic anyone who condemns the horrific Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people.

The argument against torture starts with the fact that it is illegal under International, British and US law. It is a serious crime and those responsible for it should be held accountable. But they are not held accountable for their crimes because influential commentators like Nick Cohen take to the pages of The Observor to defend their evil.

The human risks from the West performing yet another misadventure in the Middle East vastly outweighs the risk from not perverting our own laws and our own morals by torturing someone just because we can. I hope Nick Cohen will remember those risks next time he advocates the West start yet another pointless bloody war.

susie

There is substantial medical evidence that even in a non-interrogation context disrupting sleep patterns profoundly affects health. EG So strong is the evidence of a link between working nights and developing breast cancer that the Danes have paid compensation to women who developed BC after long periods of doing night shifts. Flight attendants are among those affected.

Sleep deprivation is certainly not a trivial matter, as many experiments have shown. The novelist Doris Lessing has spoken in interviews of how she intentionally drove herself to a near breakdown out of novelistic curiosity. Her recipe? "I went down to my place in Devon where I knew I wouldn't be interrupted because it's difficult to have a couple of weeks by oneself in London. I went without food and sleep, deliberately watching everything that happened. It took about three days for me to begin going crazy...I think that perhaps a lot of people are having breakdowns, or described as schizophrenics, who are simply not eating or sleeping enough." Three days...imagine this scenario going on for week after week.

A. MacAulay

ndm is right. As further point is that evidence gained under torture cannot be accepted by a court because it cannot be reliable. In the Jakob von Metzler case quoted by Kennybhoy, a senior German policeman proposed roughing up a kidnapper in order to make him reveal the whereabouts of his victim, who had, unknownst to the police already been murdered. The policeman lost his job because the integrity of the legal process must be understood, no matter what, as being the higher good.

But the GITMO prisoners were never intended, beyond a few show trials, to be prosecuted. This fact, once understood, reveals the acute danger to all our liberties engendered by following this path.

Lastly, my father was mistreated and tortured as a POW of the Japanese. The Japanese would torture prisoners years after their capture for information about British plans, when, as my father pointed out, 24 hours after capture a prisoner has practically no more useful or battle relevant military information to give.

Beefeater

ndm:

How, and against whom, were the "rights of our civilization" hard-won?

By war, at all?

Is it a right to be selected at random for murder by people who are not our true enemies? Or is it perhaps an obligation? If our true enemies are ourselves, that must be so.

Beefeater

I am sure the Danish medical community has done studies to show a link between war and death - not to mention war and stress, war and sleeplessness, war and PTSD, war and poor diet, war and pain, war and humiliation. It is an outrage that Al Qaeda recruits are insufficiently informed of this before they sign up for duty.

Fergus Pickering

The argument against torture does not start from the fact that it is illegal. It starts from the opinion that it is wrong, an opinion that Itend to share. All sorts of things are illegal. That has nothing whatever to do with arguments about ethics. Good Heavens it is illegal to light up a cigarette in a pub but of course in a sane country it would not be.

A. MacAulay

Beefeater, of course liberty grows with our consciousness of ourselves and is hard won from home grown tyrants.

ndm

A. MacAulay writes:

-- Beefeater, of course liberty grows with our consciousness of ourselves and is hard won from home grown tyrants.

Precisely.

It is shocking to see how the Blair Government, in particular, abused the 9/11 attacks to destory the rights of the British people. The British people had faced down terrorism for more than 30 years. Terrorism which had struck at the heart of the Government with the Brighton bomb, the mortar attack on 10 Downing Street and the assassination of Airey Neave in the House of Commons. But Tony Blair and his party cowed in the face of Muslim terrorism and abandoned the courage of the British people in favour of a wanton cowardice.

An American President once said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself and, as British Prime Minister, Tony Blair took that fear and deliberately magnified it to curry favour with the populist right-wing newspapers which have always sought tighter control of the people.

The greatest threat to Britain just now are those politicians, and their supporters, who seek the abandonment of hard-won freedoms in the pretense of defending thse freedoms. Giving police the power of arrest over people photographing public buildings, or even the police themselves, is merely the prototyping of a police state. How long until Britain needs a Solzhenitsyn to document it? But the person who documents it will not be Nick Cohen who is a propagandist for the state of fear.

Kennybhoy

Pete wrote:

"War, Torture, Execution and Terrorism are all one and the same."

Get a dictionary.

Kennybhoy

ndm, A. MacAulay and ,indeed, Mr Massie.

Do any of you have any children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews....?

ndm

Here is Matthew Yglesias contrasting US response to terrorism with that of India:

-- US policy, by contrast, is dominated by hysteria, moralism, and a self-defeating quest for absolute security. It’s conventional wisdom that terrorism is a tool of the weak, but unwillingness to take a deep breath and realize that al-Qaeda is, in fact, weak. If we want to build a strong, prosperous, respected America then Osama bin Laden can’t stop us. He can only goad us into taking actions that undermine our strength, prosperity, and international standing.

ndm

Bruce Anderson showed himself to be a balls-out torture advocate in an article in The Independent. Here, with some much-needed commentary, is his article:

-- Torture is revolting. A man can retain his human dignity in front of a firing squad or on the scaffold: not in a torture chamber. Torturers set out to break their victim: to take a human being and reduce him to a whimpering wreck. In so doing, they defile themselves and their society. In Britain, torture has been illegal for more than 300 years. Shortly after torture was abjured, we stopped executing witches: all part of a move away from medieval legal mores and their replacement with the modern rule of law. Until recently, at least in the UK, torture and witch-finding appeared to be safely immured in a museum of ancient atrocities.

Torture is a revolting act which, along with the punishment of witches, is an action has no place in any civilized society. Bruce Anderson is absolutely correct there. However, it is people like him who seek to allow torture freedom from the museum of ancient atrocities.

-- Yet men cannot live like angels. However repugnant we may find torture, there are worse horrors, such as the nuclear devastation of central London, killing hundreds of thousands of people and inflicting irreparable damage on mankind's cultural heritage. We also face new and terrible dangers. In the past, the threat came from other states. If they struck at us, we knew where to strike back. Now, we can almost feel nostalgic for mutually assured destruction.

Bruce Anderson has certainly forgotten the magnitude of the threat Britain faced merely 20 years ago when even a small fraction of the Soviet arsenal was enough to destroy the entirety of life in Britain. The idea that a pathetic group of Ruffians barely able to get a microscopic amount of explosives in someone's underwear should make us "almost feel nostalgic for mutually assured destruction" is so ludicrous as to be either the work of an imbecile or a liar. Frankly, someone needs to ask Bruce Anderson which it is.

-- In the Islamic world, a religious revival is taking place, analogous to the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In that era, there was no shortage of volunteers for martyrdom. Today, failed states produce hate-filled young men, who appear to believe that Allah smiles on the suicide bomber. If you are going to destroy yourself, why not inflict maximum damage upon the enemy?

Whenever you read a Western political critic describing Islam and its effects you pretty much know you are being sold a bill of goods - and, here, Bruce Anderson is no exception. There are more than 1 billion Muslims in the World and there are undoubtedly a small number who are bad actors and who use some ginnied-up political motive to justify their actions - in precisely the same way Ulster Protestants and Irish Catholics used politics to justify their actions. Let me remind Bruce Anderson, because he appears unaware of the fact, that more than 3,500 British citizens were killed during the "Troubles." Indeed, I will remind Bruce Anderson that there are bad actors across the World - so many, in fact, that every four months more Americans are killed by their fellow citizens than were killed on 9/11.

-- Admittedly, there is no evidence that the terrorists are in a position to produce dirty bombs yet, let alone fully nuclear devices. But we know one thing about technology. It spreads. Difficult processes become easier. Today's remote possibility becomes tomorrow's imminent danger. There have been frequent objections to the use of the term "war on terror". None has been cogent. All of them give the impression that those who object to the phrase do not want to face the reality. It is a reality. For the foreseeable future, we will be engaged in such a war. It is unlike any other conflict we have ever faced, for there is no straightforward route to victory. Nor is there a certainty of success.

The phrase "war on terror" is a signal of defeat used by those who wish to use even the threat of terrorism to spread fear into the population for political ends. In doing so they demonstrate shared goals with the terrorists. They are like parasite and host except we can't tell which is the parasite and which the host.

-- In any war, there are two desiderata: appropriate strategies, and allies. In this case, the principal strategic resource is self-evident: intelligence. We have no easy way of establishing who the enemy is, where he will gather his forces or how he will strike at us. We also have to deal with the enemy within. All this requires an enormous intelligence effort.

Ah, yes, conveniently there is no mention here of counter-terrorism measures that would encourage more Muslims to isolate terrorists. No mention here of fighting to end four decades of Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people which would surely demonstrate to almost all Muslims that the West is not prejudiced against them as it seemingly is with its unending appeasement of this oppression. No mention here of the West reducing its demand for oil which has led us for decades to cozy up to despotic regimes in the Middle East and so to turn a blind eye to the suffering of the people there. No mention, of course, because it doesn't fit the narrative leading inexorably, in the demented mind of Bruce Anderson, to the need to torture.

-- As other countries are facing a similar threat, they will be making a similar effort. It would be insane not to pool resources and share information. We and the Americans have long-established methods of intelligence co-operation, which are now even more important than they were in the Cold War. It also makes sense to work with other threatened nations, such as Pakistan, where a brave political elite is bearing a disproportionate burden, and receiving few thanks for doing so.

Bruce Anderson is absolutely right that we should be sharing intelligence. But we should also be sharing our morality by ensuring that those people we work with do not commit human-rights atrocities. In destroying our values by colluding with those agencies which torture we do not become more safe we increase it by causing more people to join the cause.

-- But there is a problem. It seems likely that Pakistani interrogators use torture. Although we find torture repulsive, it does not follow that those who are tasked with governing Pakistan could safely dispense with it. Our enjoyment of Shakespeare and Elizabethan madrigals is not blighted by Walsingham's rack-masters in the Tower of London. We lament the premature death of Robert Southwell, but despite Tyburn and the rack, we would still speak of Elizabethan civilisation. So let us be more generous to the Pakistani authorities. Their difficulties are at least as great as those faced by Francis Walsingham and Robert Cecil in the 1590s. Can we blame the Pakistanis for employing some 1590s methods?

Those who govern Pakistan would be well advised to govern Pakistan better rather than torturing people. Perhaps, things would not have decayed so far in Pakistan had the West not turned a blind eye to the pillaging of the Nation by its ruling elite. Bruce Anderson perhaps ought to read a good history of the Reformation in Britain before he rabbits on about the greatness of civilization in the 16yh Century.

-- When our intelligence services were invited to share the harvest reaped by the Pakistanis, there appears to have been no hesitation. Nor should there have been. We needed the information. Perhaps we should have offered the Pakistanis some advice on interrogation techniques which do not involve knife-work on suspects' genitals. It may be that we have indeed done so, in private. But Pakistan is a sovereign state and an embattled ally; a far more attractive state and a far less dubious ally than Russia was in the Second World War. We should be grateful for the Pakistanis' efforts on our behalf.

Ah how the World would be if this pathetic argument applied to the harvest of opium reaped by the Afghanis. Of course, that analogy just shows how stupid the argument of Bruce Anderson is. The idea that we should be grateful to those who slice open the genitals of other just because they can can only be the product of a depraved mind.

-- We should also be grateful to the Americans. But we should insist, again in private, that if they did torture suspects, they were wrong to do so. As they are in a stronger position than Pakistan, their interrogation doctrine should be strongly post-Walsingham. Some of the problem may have arisen from Dick Cheney, arguably the most formidable Vice-President of all time. Mr Cheney combines the neo-Conservatives' moral certainties and the realpolitik school's ruthlessness. This means that he shoots with both barrels. It also creates the risk of overkill.

And here Bruce Anderson shows himself to be a coward. Torture is a serious crime under both British and American law. Why, therefore, should we only criticize Americans in private. Here goes. President Obama - I would like you to prosecute to the fullest extent of the law ALL acts of torture committed under the aegis of the Administration of President George W. Bush. Frankly, the only private communication the British Government should have regarding the torture we know to have been committed since 9/11 is the sharing of a list of senior Bush Administration officials who would face arrest on arrival in Britain.

-- Even so, there is one benefit from the Americans' experiments with robust interrogation methods: water-boarding. Christopher Hitchens wanted to demonstrate that it was absurd to demonise water-boarding and that it was only girlie-man's torture. So he subjected himself to it. He cried off after seven seconds. That is comforting, and not only to Mr Hitchens's critics. Thus far, there has been no need for either the UK or the US to consider torture, because neither of us has been confronted by a ticking bomb. As a result of the Hitchens trial run, we know that we have something which could work.

-- That might sound frivolous. But there would be nothing frivolous about a ticking bomb. Cobra, the Cabinet's emergency committee, is in permanent session somewhere under Whitehall: the intelligence chiefs, grey and drawn from lack of sleep, inform the Prime Minister, ditto, that it seems almost certain that a nuclear device is primed to explode in the next few hours. There is a man in custody who probably knows where it is. They are ready to use whatever methods are necessary to extract the information...

Ah, yes, the old ticking bomb scenario beloved equally by fans of torture and fans of 24. I have always been puzzled by this curious belief by right-wing Western intellectuals that a Christian facing imminent death in service of some cause he believes in is a hero while a Muslim doing the same is a coward. The people who flew the planes into the Twin Towers spent their last few seconds looking at their doom - what makes Bruce Anderson believe that they would behave any differently when faced with torture. The torture of a ticking bomb suspect is the masturbatory fantasy of the right-wing sadist.

-- Before 9/11, in front of some serious lawyers, I once argued that if there were a ticking bomb, the Government would not only have a right to use torture. It would have a duty to use torture. Up sprang Sydney Kentridge, one of the great liberals of our age and a fearless defender of unpopular causes, from Nelson Mandela in the old South Africa to fox-hunting in modern Britain. I prepared to receive incoming fire. It came, in the form of a devilish intellectual challenge. "Let's take your hypothesis a bit further. We have captured a terrorist, but he is a hardened character. We cannot be certain that he will crack in time. We have also captured his wife and children".

-- After much agonising, I have come to the conclusion that there is only one answer to Sydney's question. Torture the wife and children. It is a disgusting idea. It is almost a tragedy that we even have to discuss it, let alone think of acting upon it. But there is nothing to be gained from refusing to face facts, in the way that the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuburger, did last week. His Lordship wrapped himself in a cloak of self-righteousness, traduced an entire security service, showed no understanding of the courage which its officers routinely display: no understanding, indeed, of anything beyond courtroom niceties.

And with this gibberish I am reduced to Albert Camus who wrote in an August 30, 1944 editorial in Combat:

Thirty-four Frenchmen tortured and then murdered at Vincennes: without help from our imagination these words say nothing. And what does the imagination reveal? Two men, face-to-face, one of whom is preparing to rear out the finger-nails of the other, who looks him in the eye. ...

Yet such things were possible. For ten years they were possible, and today, as if to warn us that victory on the battlefield does not signify total triumph, we learn of comrades who had their guts ripped out, their limbs torn off, and their faces kicked in. And the men who did these things were men polite enough to give up their seats on the subway, just as Himmler, who made a science and an art of torture, used the back door when he returned home at night so as not to wake his pet canary.

-- There is a threat not only to individual lives, which is of minor importance, but to our way of life and our civilisation. Torture is revolting, but we cannot substitute aesthetics for thought. Anyway, which is the greater aesthetic affront: torture, or the destruction of the National Gallery? Let us hope that we never face a ticking bomb in this country and never have to use torture. But there is only one way to avoid this. We must pray that the security services are as successful in the future as they have been in the recent past.

The greatest threat to the West comes not from a ruffian skulking in a cave in Afghanistan but from those Western intellectuals who have so readily abandoned the freedoms won so dearly over the millennia of our civilization. There is indeed a small threat from terrorism but it has been and remains minor in comparison to even natural threats - let alone the threat of murder by our fellow citizens. The best way to fight terrorism is not to succumb to the fear sought by the terrorist. Bruce Anderson appears to be waving the yellow flag of cowardice. He should donate it to the National Gallery.

We can look back and wonder how so many Germans could have been taken in so readily by the evil that was Nazism. We need wonder no more because we can see the echo of that moral failure in those who rush to torture the wives and children of people who may have been involved in a criminal act. And what comes next?

Patricia Shaw

Well, good question.

Why don t you try it, for a week, and tell us if you think it is or isn't.

T Scanlon

"In Britain, torture has been illegal for more than 300 years."

Depends what you mean. Flogging was a judicial punishment even after WW2 in Britain.

And corporal punishment went on in British schools for decades after it was banned in prisons.

I guess it's not so easy to make these nice distinctions about what does or doesn't constitute torture when you're the guy in charge of getting intel out of a known valuable prisoner. What I ultimately find distressing is the contradictions underlying the idea that law enforcers can always act with the ethics of a mythical saint. Winnie Mandela, anyone?

Snowman

ndm:

you and Bruce sound noble, morally pure, compassionate, admirable and stuff, but real life ain’t like that. If you find yourself in a jungle surrounded by wild animals with no moral code guiding their behaviour you would be better off to fight on their terms otherwise you may not get out of there. My leading guru Edmund Burke tells me that in war morality gets suspended.

Believe it or not, over 45 years ago I found myself deprived of sleep for under 100 hours under intense interrogation by an agency known to have killed millions. It worked, and I’m still here. I cannot say I would like it repeated though.

ndm

Snowman writes:

-- you and Bruce sound noble, morally pure, compassionate, admirable and stuff, but real life ain’t like that.

I obviously didn't make it clear enough that I consider Bruce Anderson to be morally depraved. Edmunc Burke may be your guru but he also died more than 200 years ago - and almost a century before nations started to codify rules of war to prevent a descent to inhumanity. Consequently, he is not a guru with much to inform us about our current situation where we have the Geneva Conventions and the International Convention on Torture, etc.

Snowman

ndm:

Do remind me how many people got slaughtered in armed conflicts after the enlightened lawyers put together the noble conventions you mention, please.

ndm

Snowman asks:

-- Do remind me how many people got slaughtered in armed conflicts after the enlightened lawyers put together the noble conventions you mention, please.

Snowman presumably hearks back to those glorious days when phosgene drifted across the Western Front. What next, Zyklon B?

The best way to ensure that the laws of war and other international humanitarian laws are respected is to hold those accountable who violate them. Our refusal to do so is a blight that has endangered the lives, if not killed, thousands of people over the years.

Beefeater

ndm:

I hadn't realized one could set up one's own coconut shies in this space. Does the Spectator charge stall fees? I have read scores of people I disagree with and who badly need my comments. Now I know I can import their writings here and give each of them a piece of my mind, at earnest length, in excruciating detail, and with painful, but brave, candour.

I'll just go and do some internet surfing - be right back.

ndm

Beefeater -

And there I thought I was just addressing the increasing popularuty of torture among a certain segement of the British intelligentsia including a man who is the former political editor of this magazine. There are many ways to press an argument on the Internet and the paragraph-by-paragraph public dissection is certainly one of them - although one that should be used sparingly. Anderson fully deserves the opprobrium he receives as a result of his despicable article - and I'm glad to see that it now dominates his Wikipedia entry.

WrinkleybutNice

I did a seminar with 6th formers on the subject of torture, and asked them to identify (from a list of about 25 things from sleep deprivation to waterboarding) what they thought torture was. One young man suggested that even just being banged up in jail for offences you knew you hadn't committed was akin to torture. Especially if the imprisonment lasted for several years .......

Kennybhoy

ndm, A.MacAuley and, indeed, Mr Massie.

Why won't you acknowledge let alone answer my question?

ndm

Kennybhoy complains that I, among others, have not answered the following question:

-- Do any of you have any children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews....?

Although I fail to see the relevance of the question to a discussion on torture my answers are: yes, no, yes and yes. Perhaps Kennybhoy is one of those grinches who believes the presence of children to be torture.

Jonathan Woolf

I find it bizarre that there are those who still maintain that "torture works". If you read statements by anyone who is tortured, including those quoted above by Alex Massie, you'll note there is a common theme "I'd have signed / said anything to get it to stop". Torture, therefore, produces unreliable intelligence. It is therefore only of use to those who already know what they want the tortured person to say (the false confession) as a prelude to a kangeroo trial, and of no use for those trying to solve or prevent a crime. I would not call John McCain a liberal, yet he is a passionate opponent of torture for these reasons.

In addition, the moral and propaganda victory the West's use of extraordinary rendition and torture has handed our enemies is extremely damaging. It has also had a deeply corrosive and corrupting effect on the rule of law and our the attitude of our rulers, and those involved, as they get drawn into a web of sanctioning torture and then trying to cover it up.

Ian Walker

Great, if horrifying, article.

The way to win the argument is to stop trying to fight it on the torture advocates territory. Instead of trying to decide whether a particular technique is illegal or immoral, we could simply state what is an acceptable form of gaining evidence, and rule anything else to be illegal.

If it isn't a taped interview, with an independent legal representative available, then it isn't valid.

Fergus Pickering

It's a bit late but I do not consider the corporal punishment of children to be torture. If every bloody thing is torture then the debate, such as it is, collapses.

Many a boy would be VASTLY improved by some corporal punishment.

A. MacAulay

Kennybhoy, I'm sorry but I thought I had not only understoood your question and it's implications and answered you. The murderer of Jakob Metzeler was brought to justice and the evidence that convicted him was untainted by his being beaten up by a policeman who, with all due understanding for the cruelty of his dilemna, forgot himself.

A story, told me by an aqaintance whose father served as a French Military Policeman during the Algerian uprising, is interesting.

Algerian rebels were very tough and it was impossible to beat information out of them. Even attaching their extremities to those wind-up field telephones and giving them electric shocks didn't work. So the French kept a pig in a stie out back, the mere sight of which or hearing it's grunts and snuffles so terrified them that they told everything, on the spot.

The implication was that the French MP's would beat and electrocute their captives until it got tiresome and then take them to meet Mr Pig.

But lastly, no-one could be sure if they were telling the truth, or telling anything just to get it to stop. And, by the way, the French lost Algeria, and very nearly France as well.

Snowman

ndm:

To clear a thing or two, I also abhor torture, but not as a matter of principle, which seems to be where you’re coming from.

In my little book it says that any principle should only inform one’s behaviour, not rule it. Furthermore, how one behaves in given circumstances e.g. deciding whether to use sleep deprivation or not to extract critical evidence, should also be guided by the circumstances.

To torture a thief - no way, to inflict it on a terrorist who won't reveal the whereabouts of a dirty bomb in the capital being fed tea and biscuits - every time.

Snowman

Jonathan Woolf:

has it crossed our mind that amongst the ‘I’d have confessed to everything’ may have also contained a bit of information useful if not crucial to the investigation?

A. MacAulay

Snowman, I suggest your doing some research starting with Friedrich Spee's, "Cautio Criminalis" from 1631. The point I'm trying to make is that you can torture any answer you want to hear out of practically anybody.

A regime that condones torture does so not to extract information from putative enemies, but to terrorize, coerce and demoralise it's own citizens. This has always been the case.

Beefeater

-"A regime that condones torture does so not to extract information from putative enemies, but to terrorize, coerce and demoralise it's own citizens. This has always been the case."

As you say, a police-state regime (Soviet Russia, Nationalist South Africa, Ba'athist, etc.) tortures its own citizens to terrorize it. It tortures captured citizens (enemies) of other countries as a propaganda demonstration of strength (cruelty, ruthlessness) and to elicit "confessions" used for domestic PR and to provide a colorable justification for the mistreatment. Information is not usually the goal, as the captors know that the people they capture are not "spies" and do not possess information.

In the case of non-state, or quasi-state thug gangs - Hamas, Al Qaeda - the capture and torture of enemy civilians (Danny Pearl) or low level regular soldiers (Shalit) are also not likely to be for the purpose of gaining significant information, but for PR or bargaining or reasons.

On the other hand, when democracies capture jihadists on the battlefield, they justifiably assume that the captives have a lot of information. The details of the jihadist's training and contacts are important, and with details provided from other detained jihadists can map the big picture useful for the defense of the nations they wish to terrorize. There might, of course, be a ticking bomb scenario - in which case, whether you like it or not, "torture" has proven effective in getting true -actionable- intelligence (KSM). But the more common situation is that the detainee is kept for slow, patient, incremental build up of information. Enhanced techniques which inflict stress, pain, and humiliation (beyond the fact of being captive) are used, as necessary. Experienced interrogators - not sadists - know when the treatment is not yielding useful information. The fact that the renditions and interrogations are secret, and that jihadists have been released and repatriated (often to take up arms again), demonstrates that the "torture" practiced by the US is for purposes other than propaganda or cruelty for the sake of cruelty, or for terrorizing the enemy.

The harsh treatment of captured, self-declared combatant enemies does not turn a democratic, rights-respecting nation into a "regime". The capture of terrorist enemies does not turn them into prisoners of conscience, prisoners of war, or even criminal prisoners.

If we cannot tell the difference between war and law, terrorists and criminals, lawless regimes and democratically elected governments defending their nations, real enemies and "true" enemies (for ndm, neocons and other Zionists), then we deserve to and will be murdered and maimed en masse as we go about our daily lives. And we should equally deserve to live under a totalitarian regime which knocks on the door at midnight. Whither civilization, freedom, humanity, then?

A. MacAulay

Military prisoners thought to have useful information will be put under pressure and this will be unpleasant, threatening and I'm sure they also expect it. There are international agreements about such things and also internal guidelines.

Gauantanamo is highly publicised, extra-legal torture centre. It serves a propaganda purpose.

Prafulla More

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