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Torturing
the Qaida suspects
would
be a setback for civilisation
By JONATHAN
POWER
November 7, 2001
LONDON - Primitive man, like other animals, followed his
instincts and killed his enemy as swiftly as the job
could be done. Archaeologists who have dug up prehistoric
skeletons have found no evidence of torture. Even human
sacrifices were made without prolonged suffering.
Torture, the systematized use of violence to inflict the
maximum amount of pain in order to extract information,
to break resistance or simply to intimidate, is a product
of civilization. But to reintroduce it now would be one
of the greatest setbacks for civilisation imaginable.
Before the American authorities rush into it with the
righteousness that comes from a conviction that they
might be extracting information that could forestall a
terrorist nuclear attack on Manhattan they would do well
to ponder the course the debate on torture has taken over
the three and a half millennia of Western civilization.
It has been abolished for good reason.
Both the Greek and Roman civilizations left detailed
records of the use of torture. Both of them prohibited
torture for a citizen, but allowed it for outsiders. In
ancient Athens a slave's testimony was not considered
reliable unless he had been tortured. Rome tortured the
early Christians.
But the Church, repelled by this torture of
Christians, used its growing influence to abolish torture
throughout Europe. Until the time of Pope Innocent IV in
the thirteenth century it was practically unknown in the
Western world.
The Inquisition brought it back. Heretics were forced
to undergo a very systematic use of torture. A magistrate
sat by carefully logging the instruments used, the length
of the torture and the confessions extracted.
Nevertheless, the undercurrent of revulsion remained
and by the seventeenth century the use of torture began
to die out. In 1640 it was abolished in England by law,
although the torture of suspected "witches" continued for
some time. After the 1789 revolution, France made the use
of torture a capital offence. Most German states and
Russia abolished it early in the nineteenth century.
Moreover, the European powers did much to dampen down its
use in the many parts of the world where they had
empires.
In the twentieth century torture returned with a
vengeance, reaching proportions that dwarfed even the
darkest Middle Ages. Although it was the Nazis who
re-introduced the use of large-scale torture, it had been
used sporadically in the civil war that followed the
Russian revolution and it was Mussolini's fascists that
were the first government in the twentieth century to
make torture an official policy of state. The black
shirts invented their own particular technique- pumping a
prisoner full of castor oil to "purge him of the will to
exist".
Spain under Franco continuing using torture right
through into the 1970s and even democratic Spain has had
its scandals, with the use of torture being unearthed
against Basque dissidents. In Britain in the early 1970s
torture was used against IRA detainees. During a London
court hearing in 1999 on whether General Augusto
Pinochet, the former strong man of Chile, could be
extradited to Spain to stand trial for the use of
torture, his lawyer argued in his defence that, "there's
torture everywhere, including in Britain and Northern
Ireland".
In 1984, after many years of debate, the UN finally
approved a legally binding treaty against torture. The
list of those who fought for it in these years included
the expected- Scandinavian governments and Holland- and
the quite unexpected- the U.S. administration of Ronald
Reagan. A majority of the world's countries had decided
that whatever the supposed value of torture in extremis,
it was in practice so cruel, so lacking in positive
results (information obtained by torture is rarely
valuable), and so degrading of the user that it was
impossible to justify. As the arrest of Pinochet showed,
it is a UN convention with teeth and there are a growing
number of instances of other well-known torturers lying
low in countries where they believe they can escape the
long arm of persecution- the convention allows states to
prosecute a suspected torturer even if the crime were
committed in another country. Mengistu Haile Mariam, the
former Ethiopian dictator wanted in his own country for
crimes of torture flew from his refuge in Zimbabwe to
safer North Korea. Fear of arrest forced the former
Indonesian dictator General Suharto to cancel the trips
he makes annually to Germany for medical treatment.
If the U.S. wanted to use torture it would have to
withdraw from a UN convention it has solemnly ratified-
no easy legal task- and live with the opprobrium of
having undermined what is regarded all over the world as
a serious and important step forward in mankind's quest
to build a consensus on what are crimes against humanity
and on how they should be punished. Its "torturers" would
face the possibility of arrest should they ever travel
abroad. The U.S. has plenty of other ways of garnering
the information it so earnestly requires. Torture would
provide no short cut to the truth and it would set back
the cause of civilisation a long way.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2001 By
JONATHAN POWER
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