Craig Murray has an interesting post trying to make the case that receiving information extracted or suspected to be extracted via torture is the same as receiving child pornography.

I have posted this comment which tries to look at the key dilemma: what is the best way for democracies to change brutal dictatorships?

If isolating them rarely works, how to engage to make things better without ending up becoming ‘complicit’ in their misdeeds?

Thus:

Craig,

An interesting point. But not quite right.

The child pornographer is doing something vile from which no good can even theoretically emerge. The torturer is doing something vile from which something ‘good’ might emerge, ie information leading to the prevention of terrorist acts. Hence the dilemma referred to quite openly in that House of Lords judgement, which came down on the side of using this information, ‘poisoned fruit’ as it was or might be.

Ms Sands seeks to qualify that judgement in various ways:

"The question then becomes: at what point does the regular receipt of information that is known to have been obtained by torture amount in some way to a contribution? It depends on the factual scenario against which that happens."

But that too cuts the other way – the better the relationship you have with these torturing villains, the more likely you might be to get information which saves UK lives?

Plus, if you want to stop these people treating their prisoners so badly, maybe it is better to get alongside them and coax them patiently towards proper behaviour – the evidence that isolating and reviling villains makes them behave better is pretty thin? This does not mean even a forthright Ambassador having drinks and frank talks with the Interior Minister, who is probably a meaningless front-man. It means having a hard-headed intelligence liaison relationships built up over years with the toughest people in the system, to try to win their confidence and show them that cruelty is not the only tool at their disposal?

What I have never seen in your writings on this site and your two books is a considered view from you on how to change such dictatorships. Your book makes a good case for the merits of an Ambassador being clear and forthright with the Uzbeks, and you won some local clout accordingly.

But had you stayed in post for the full tour, how exactly would you have used that influence to change eg their torturing ways? Would eg cancelling an EBRD event there really make any serious difference? Maybe yes in the longer term, at the price of their behaving even worse in the shorter term to show that they won’t be bullied? How does one explain that outcome to the relatives of the short-term victims?

Surely the only way forward is via diplomatic engagement of different sorts (see eg the usual arguments for talking to terrorists or freedom fighters, and the EU lumbering back to talking to Belarus). But that opens you up to the charge of ‘indirect complicity’ in their torture/violence too, if in fact they are simply stringing you and the rest of us along?

Plus the more you engage with the regime, the harder it is to be a credible source of comfort to the lonely democrats calling for change? The core diplomatic dilemma of my own career.

In other words, don’t we end up in a rather dull, unhappy position where we have to expect torture round the world to dwindle over decades (if we are lucky), while in the meantime we in the democratic world just do our best to set an example while also protecting our citizens in as least dishonourable a way as the overall circumstances permit?

That is where President Clinton ended up, and where President Obama appears to be heading. Neither of them Bushhitler types?

In short, how to turn Passion into Effectiveness?