My posting below on Torture has prompted various comments, some of which have come from people arriving here via my former FCO colleague Craig Murray’s site and who support strongly his insistence that Torture Does Not Work.

See for example Moo:

I hope you’re not seriously suggesting two things: that torture works and you condone its use. Whatever in your life has led you to think that, I worry for your sanity, soul and mental abilities.

And Anticant:

You seem content to base policies on the most dubious of hypotheticals – such as torture “works” It may work by producing information, but all the accumulating evidence is that the information so obtained is not reliable.

Craig’s own site makes this argument (emphasis added)  powerfully and explicitly:

The ticking bomb scenario is a Hollywood myth. 99 per cent of the tens of thousands of cases of torture in the War on Terror have been "Fishing expedition". Torture does not work. The tortured individual will not tell you the truth, but will tell whatever he or she thinks will satisfy the torturer and stop the pain. We know this from history. People confessed under torture that their cat was the Devil and they flew on broomsticks. In my time in Uzbekistan children were tortured in front of their parents and dissidents were boiled alive…

He then asserts that the FCO has started to shift its ground towards the Cheney argument that "Torture works" and throws in wildly that (a) I qua the FCO’s leading Internet sock-puppet (b) am supporting the FCO by (c) aggressively promoting this ‘neo-con school’ proposition.

Sigh.

See also this from Craig:

But Charles Crawford’s huffing and puffing cannot disguise his failure to answer the question I put to him. When he was British Ambassador to Poland, did he know about the CIA secret prison near Sczytno Szymany, about torture in it and about the extraordinary rendition flights through that airport? Until he answers those questions, there is nothing else to discuss with him.

At last, a sensible professional point, albeit gracelessly expressed. I’ll have a crack at that one soon.

What about the unqualified Torture Doesn’t Work claim?

It has plenty of prominent support, from widely differing points of view. See eg Anne Applebaum and Robert Fisk.

But without agreeing what we mean precisely by the very question Does Torture Work? it is not possible to say what evidence might be needed to answer it.

As these and other articles and Craig’s own argument as quoted above show, the claim that Torture Does Not Work is based upon various propositions which are not necessarily mutually exclusive:

  • if you torture someone for long enough they’ll say whatever you want, truth or lies – how can you distinguish the two?
  • whatever is admitted under torture is worthless because it has been forced from someone
  • even if torture does extract some accurate information, there are better. more honourable ways of getting it which also may well give more accurate information
  • someone is more likely to cooperate and tell the truth if treated decently and not faced with the prospect of harm
  • plus you can never be sure – you may be torturing someone whom you suspect of knowing things who in fact does not know those things and/or who is completely innocent, a ruinous situation
  • more widely, it radicalises opponents and/or brutalises the questioner and/or heavily damages a hard-won international reputation for decency, thereby making a difficult situation worse
  • by being open to receive ‘evidence’ extracted by torture, you (the West)create a market for it and so get more torture, defeating your policy of making the world more civilised (Note: a point Craig Murray makes well and eloquently)

But all these arguments (casuistry?) do not bluntly get to the dark heart of the matter. Can you torture someone into telling you enough vital accurate information to make an operational difference, and maybe save innocent lives?

This, I assume, is why Dick Cheney has asked that evidence be made public to show that the Bush Administration’s ‘harsh interrogation techniques’ did produce reliable and important information.

My view?

I don’t have a ‘view’. I know that Torture Does Work, in this direct grim sense: that torture can force truthful information from the victim which he/she otherwise probably would not have given to the torturer.

(Note: NB it also may be true that in passing over that truthful information, the torture victim adds all sorts of misleading lies or half-truths, either in delirium or deliberately to create confusion or to tell the torturer what he/she wants to hear. And/or that the torturer does not know what to believe and/or suspects that the victim has even more to tell, and so carries on the brutality.)

This is a strong (and probably to some people disturbing) claim to make, so I’ll say it again to be quite clear: torture can ‘work’ in achieving the results it seeks, wearing down someone to the point of agonised confession of the truth.

But I make it confidently. Why?

Because yesterday I met and talked at length to someone who many years ago in WW2 was tortured by the Soviet secret police. After four days and nights of sustained rubber-hose beatings he finally confessed to them the truth: that he was indeed as they suspected a member of the patriotic underground Polish National Army.

This confession of ‘counter-revolutionary anti-Soviet’ activity led to his death sentence, commuted to long years of labour in the Siberian gulag.

It is all described by him in simple, unambiguous and deeply moving language – in his forthcoming book:

And given that well over a million Poles (including Polish communists) were brutalised and murdered by Stalin’s forces during and after WW2, I suspect that this was not the only example.

My point? Two for now.

  • That (to repeat myself) the moral challenges arising from the torture issue arise because it can in fact ‘work’ in the hardest sense of the expression – it can and does break people down to the point where they confess things which are true and which they have strained mightily to hide.
  • Hence, for that reason democracies or for that matter any regime may face agonising choices in some limited extreme cases – better to be very harsh with a known villain, or risk many innocent deaths?

Note that I give no answer to that last question. But I do not think it dishonourable to pose it, if only because anyone in public life has a supreme responsibility in real life to save lives including by protecting the public from would-be terrorists.

Even asking it no doubt enrols me squarely in Craig Murray’s evil über-neocon Bushhitler FCO Blair-Miliband sock-puppet school. So be it.

I note only that this very point looks to have been accepted without much difficulty by the most famous Head Boy of that degenerate school, who went on helpfully to suggest how procedures might be devised for that ghastly situation.

Former President Clinton himself (and see also this which seems to be a separate interview).

Bill Clinton’s thinking, by the way, surely dents the argument of those who say that once you accept that there is a case for using ‘harsh force’ against a dangerous suspect you must necessarily slide down a slippery slope into a bottomless pit.

His words show an intelligent leader of world-class democratic credentials trying with impressive honesty to show how a democracy facing a clear-cut extreme situation might make a limited, controlled exception on how ‘harsh force’ might be applied to a suspect, including with the person at the top formally accepting the political and direct personal responsibility for that choice. Plus he points out that as a matter of law (emphasis added):

the thing that drives—that, that gives the president’s position a little edge is that every one of us can imagine the following scenario: We get lucky, we get the number three guy in al-Qaeda, and we know there’s a big bomb going off in America in three days and we know this guy knows where it is.  Don’t we have the right and the responsibility to beat it out of him? But keep in mind, in 99 percent of the interrogations, you don’t know those things.

Now, it happens like even in the military regulations, in a case like that, they do have the power to use extreme force because there is an imminent threat to the United States, and then to live with the consequences…

Not exactly the sort of thing arch-torturers Stalin and Mao and Che Guevara and Saddam Hussein and Pinochet and the Greek Colonels and the killers of Steve Biko and the rest had in mind, as they met in the very darkest deepest bottomless pit via that slippery slope, to torture between them millions of people. Their aim was not motivated by human decency to try to save innocent lives but to reinforce their selfish rule of terror.

Do all moral slopes lead to a bottomless pit? I don’t believe so.

If the world shed a bitter tear and adopted that vile American neocon Clintonian standard and then respected it, the amount of torture going on in the world would plummet once and for all.

Last, but much the most important.

Let’s all stop using noisy Torture Doesn’t Work claims for polemical or party-political or snidey smug self-promoting reasons.

To do so shows the deepest cynical disrespect for those heroes among us who have been tortured.

Who, in the last, could not take it any more – and confessed the truth.