Senator McCain
has
won the battle but
lost the war
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments directly
to JonatPower@aol.com
September 29, 2006
LONDON - Even if the U.S. Senate’s compromise
with the Bush Administration over the Geneva Conventions and the use of
torture works out in the way that Senator John McCain intends it will
- and his previous efforts have always been given short shrift in practice
- the damage has already been done. As Brita Sydhoff, the secretary-general
of the International Rehabilitation Council for Torture Victims told me
in her office in a tranquil Copenhagen street last week, “We had
always expected with the post Cold War spread of democracy and 141 countries
signing the UN Convention Against Torture that torture would diminish
sharply. It hasn’t. It is painful to see the world’s leading
democracy practising it and now that we have lost momentum it will be
very difficult to persuade other countries to forgo it”.
Her council which has an enviable record in treating torture victims all
over the world - with nine treatment centres in the Middle East alone
- feels it is losing a battle which once it was winning. “Even my
own country, Sweden, connived with the U.S. in allowing rendition of terrorist
suspects to Egypt, where we know they were tortured.”
Nieves Molina Clemente, her legal advisor, makes the point that information
garnered by torture is invariably “polluted”. “Imagine
what you would say if you were being tortured and were desperate for them
to ease up.” I put to her the ticking bomb scenario- wouldn’t
you torture the man who you knew had planted a nuclear bomb in a city
and was the only one who knew where it was?” “Real life it
not like that”, she replied. “Nearly all cases of torture
happen in onward rolling scenarios - like the struggle against Al Qaeda
or in Northern Ireland - there is time for well trained interrogators
to do their job - and the best who have the most success in extracting
unpolluted information know that torture doesn’t help them. You
can talk to some of them in the CIA”.
Harvard professor Elaine Scarry asks in Sanford Levinson’s collection
of essays, “Torture”, “What makes the ticking bomb scenario
improbable is the notion that in a world where knowledge is ordinarily
so imperfect, we are suddenly granted the omniscience to know that the
person in front of us holds this crucial information about the bomb’s
whereabouts. Why not just grant us the omniscience to know where the bomb
is!”
That the tortuously slow legal system of the United States has not allowed
a case of torture to be brought before the Supreme Court is a black mark
for western jurisprudence. Justice delayed is justice denied.
In contrast the Israeli Supreme Court grabbed the nettle of this issue
even as it was a stinging political issue. In 1999 its president, Aharon
Barak, summarised their conclusion in outlawing torture: “Although
a democracy must often fight with one hand behind its back, it nevertheless
has the upper hand.”
The Court did leave the security services a small window of opportunity
in extreme cases: if an interrogator felt that he had no recourse but
to torture he, when tried for this offence, could use the traditional
common-law defence of necessity and then a jury of his peers would decide
the case on its merits. Even Professor Scarry finds that acceptable. “That
one might have to do something that is wrong does not mean it has ceased
to be wrong or punishable…and while it is possible that a jury would
exonerate someone in this situation, it does not follow that any such
guarantee should be provided before the fact.”
The Israeli Supreme Court, addressing “the difficult reality in
which Israel finds itself”, concluded, “This is the destiny
of democracy, as not all means are acceptable to it, and not all practices
employed by its enemies are open before it.”
Senator McCain and his allies have concentrated their argument on the
Geneva Conventions and the need for honoring its prohibitions against
torture in order to increase the leverage against future enemies who may
be tempted to torture American prisoners of war. But most torture these
days is not carried out by countries at war with another. It is simply
a tool of the military or the police in repressing opposition and protest.
As a tool of intimidation it certainly works, but if we want to see more
freedom around the world we don’t want them to be able to justify
their behaviour by quoting ours.
This is why such conservatives as Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher
had no reservations about seeking the ratification of the UN Convention
Against Torture. And why it is such a setback for democracy to watch an
American government throwing this to the wind.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Get
free articles &
updates
Follow this link to read about - and
order -
Jonathan Power's book written for the
40th
Anniversary of Amnesty International
"Like
Water on Stone - The Story of Amnesty
International"
Här kan du läsa om - och
köpa -
Jonathan Powers bok på svenska
"Som
Droppen Urholkar
Stenen"
Tell a friend about this article
Send to:
From:
Message and your name
 
|