A reader points me to this purposeful article on the philosophical limits on Power by a former Director of Public Prosecutions, Ken Macdonald:

The difference is that when you find yourself possessed of power, accountability quite suddenly broadens in the most alarming ways. This is very disturbing. Opinions are easy to express when they matter only to you. When they matter to everyone else besides, life gets a lot more complicated: you can find your moral certainties growing surprisingly promiscuous.

So, what of torture, an ultimate abuse of state power? Of course, the practice is always beyond law and salvation, and yet the line between using material obtained this way and complicity in the crimes that create it is more crooked than we’d like to allow.

What are we to do, for example, with information of sinister provenance that could prevent a terrorist attack in London? Clearly, if we get it, we’ve no choice but to use it. Of course, we might lose some self- satisfaction in doing so, but that’s probably better than the legs, arms and torsos other people might lose if we don’t.

And this is the territory that the security services inhabit every day. It is, of course, a great shame that the Government has wildly devalued their dilemma by pretending that the choices we face are starker than they usually are: the elevation of security paranoia to attack our constitution for purely party political advantage was a particular disgrace in the Blair years.

Well, yes.

The argument that information of sinister provenance is ‘unreliable’ (see the readers’ comments below his article) is phoney.

Why? Because most information of any sort is ‘unreliable’ and needs to be checked and checked again as best it might be before being relied on. See eg the newspapers.

There are two sorts of ‘information;’in this context :

  • things the interrogators suspect and ‘want to hear’, where the person interrogated may say anything to satisfy them and end the pressure ("Yes, I confess to planting that bomb")
  • things the interrogators did not know about before and which can be checked and cross-checked using different techniques to give new leads and insights into how terrorist networks operate ("Yes, I was there with Mr X and Mrs Y, who arrived at Heathrow that morning – it’s all on my laptop which is buried in my garden")

In that latter case, if the identification of other people for the first time and/or laptop gives a host of new and verifiable information on terrorist planning, Mr Macdonald argues that that information surely should be used to try to save lives. Not many voters will disagree with him?

That article links to a strong statement by General Lord Guthrie earlier this year, commending the Obama Administration’s decision to end certain ‘harsh’ interrogation techniques:

It is imperative that the clear message from the very top is that there is no circumstance in which it is to be sanctioned. Soldiers and security services must be properly trained in lawful interrogation techniques. This is no job for amateurs …

Torture is not only illegal, unethical, ineffective, cruel and counter-productive, it is also dumb.

Which sounds and indeed is fine.

But it does not help us deal with the dark grey area of Real Life – how to deal with the smirking terrorist suspect who is banking on your good nature and restraint letting him and his co-villains commit new atrocities?

What sort of ‘pressure’ on such people in practice as exerted by amateurs or professionals is unambiguously reasonable and likely to be effective, given that anything which in fact makes a difference is likely to be denounced as ‘torture’ of one sort or other by smug defence lawyers?

I gave a talk the other day to a fine group of students mainly drawn from Eastern Europe. I made the point that had I been in the policy food chain when NATO was bombing Serbia in 1999 (the UK Chief of Defence Staff then being Sir Charles Guthrie), I would have had some real moral qualms.

What was moral or lawful or wise or decent about blowing to pieces hundreds of Serbian squaddies but not going hard after Milosevic and other top leaders themselves as directly responsible for Serbia’s grim policies in Kosovo?

I’m with Ken Macdonald when he says this:

Exercising power is tricky. Before you have it, you may entertain shockingly naive notions about how easy it will be, the way it will feel and what you’re going to do with it.

Naturally, you have fantasies of perfection. Choices, you think, will be simple. Right is obviously right, after all, and wrong is very definitely wrong. Unsurprisingly, this imagined world collapses very quickly: it can’t survive what comes with control…