Painful truths

Juan E. Méndez has a fantastic CV. Mercilessly tortured in Argentina, the country of his birth, when 30, he is now, four decades on, the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, in other words, its chief investigator. In between, he has worked for Human Rights Watch for 15 years and been the United Nations First Special Adviser to the Secretary General on the Prevention of Genocide.

Why does torture still exist? The author points out the painful truth: that many ordinary people have come to believe it to be not only inevitable but often even desirable. And some regimes try to deny that ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ — waterboarding, sleep deprivation, stress positions, for example — constitute torture at all, thereby lending them legality.

Méndez attacks the American author Alan Dershowitz for defending torture on the grounds of the highly theoretical ‘ticking-bomb’ argument: that there is only one person who is able to prevent a bomb detonating in five minutes’ time. He refuses to de-activate it. Would you torture him? For one thing, this never happens. For another, yes, you would; but when or if you were convicted of torture, your sentence, if any, would of course reflect the circumstances. It has nothing to do with the real world.

Taking a Stand principally examines the attitude of the United States. President Carter was strongly and actively against torture but when Ronald Reagan took over in January 1981, most of Carter’s work was undone. Things deteriorated further under Bush senior, did not improve under Clinton, and hit rock bottom under Bush junior.

As soon as Obama came to office he put an immediate end to some of the Bush regime’s worst horrors. But he failed to close down Guantanamo Bay, and has not pursued those who, in earlier years, were involved in what amounted to torture.