What the debate here and here needs is a dose of moral outrage.
We are talking about TORTURE folks-the deliberate inflicting of pain on a human being to obtain information. TORTURE that Amnesty described thirty years ago as “a cancer degrading those who use it and those who benefited”. It was the “ultimate corruption”. No one can surely argue that Amnesty’s view is wrong today even after 9/11, the Madrid train bombs and the Tube outrages in London on July 7th. But I detect a gradual erosion of this attitude.
The erosion started in the United States shortly after 9/11. The Bush administration, afraid of having yet another finger of blame pointed at them, looked for any way to increase its intelligence reach. So we have the creation of an “unlawful combatant” to avoid the strictures of the Geneva Conventions. They then move on to the use of Rumsfeld’s “coercive interrogation” techniques. We see torture being used at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, CIA planes flying terrorist suspects to Syria, Egypt and Uzbekistan.You've got to be pretty gullible to believe they are being moved for a city break! Those suspects who are eventually released give consistent accounts of being subject to torture. Many confirm our own security services were present when the pain was being inflicted.
Then we witness our government attempting to persuade the
High Court to use of torture-tainted evidence. At the same time, the Foreign Office is negotiating with states where torture in endemic to rehome criminal
suspects with the promise that they will not be ill treated! It is followed by
the egregious refusal of Her Majesty’s government to answer substantial
questions about our involvement in “extraordinary renditions”. We hear the
Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary discussing this like two commercial
lawyers going over the clauses in some PFI contract. We then read Craig
Murray’s account of his experiences in Uzbekistan, and our involvement with the
Uzbek gangster government.
No longer does our government, I fear, believe that torture is the “ultimate corruption”. I suspect their focus groups tell them that, for most of the electorate, human rights are an irrelevance.
We have been asked to “Make Poverty History” to eradicate malaria, polio and smallpox and to buy wristbands to support cancer charities and to demonstrate opposition to bullying. What about “Making Torture History”?
