Torture: a good case for just saying "no"

When measures to defend a society undermine its fundamental values, just what are they defending?

The revelations by a US Senate committee of the extent of torture carried out by the CIA in the so-called “war against terror” is shocking, but hardly surprising. Anyone who believed that the CIA had been engaging only in “vigorous interrogation” – presumably intense questioning with the occasional resort to limited physical violence – was living in a dream world. It was obvious that the CIA, and no doubt MI6 and the security services of other US client states, were engaging in the most serious forms of torture they felt they could get away with.

It now turns out that these included not merely waterboarding, but “rectal rehydration” and even “rectal feeding” by the CIA itself.

It’s hard to see how any society that adopts these methods can claim to be civilised. If we are behave with the same brutality as the very enemies we denounce, how can we claim to be preferable to them? Are we not just two ugly bruisers slogging it out to decide who will dominate the other? Where does that leave our claim to moral or political superiority?

Upholding democratic values. Or undermining them?

The Senate report doesn’t even find the methods justified by the results. According to the Guardian:

After examining 20 case studies, the investigators found that torture “regularly resulted in fabricated information”, said committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, in a statement summarising the findings. She called the torture program “a stain on our values and on our history”.

“During the brutal interrogations the CIA was often unaware the information was fabricated.” She told the Senate the torture program was “morally, legally and administratively misguided” and “far more brutal than people were led to believe”.

The ineffectiveness of the torture may seem to make it even less defensible. But that would be a wrong direction for the argument to take. Three years ago, I felt obliged to admit my admiration for one of Britain’s leading spooks, Eliza Manningham Buller who had recently stepped down from the top post in the British MI5 security service. Here’s what I said about her then:

On the use of waterboarding by the United States, she said ‘torture is illegal in our national law and in international law. It is wrong and never justified.’

Like quite a few opponents of the use of torture, I’ve tended to argue that it doesn’t generate good intelligence. She on the other hand believes that it sometimes does, but points out that the argument that lifesaving intelligence was sometime obtained by it, “and I accept it was, still does not justify it. Torture should be utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives. I am proud my Service refused to turn to the torture of high-level German prisoners in the Second World War, when, in the early years, we stood alone and there was a high risk of our being invaded and becoming a Nazi province. So if not then, why should it be justified now?”

That’s the only wholly moral position to take. There are certain things that we decide, as societies based on rights and laws, never to do. We should never target civilians in war, even if we believe it might be effective, and the carpet bombing of German cities or the use of nuclear weapons against Japan simply cannot be justified. We should never target children and the relatives of enemy combatants, and the British use of concentration camps in the Boer War was indefensible. And we should never torture.

It’s that simple. We want to be better than our enemies. We should never stoop to using their weapons.

Whether or not they might advance our cause.

Time to chill

You have nothing to fear but fear itself Franklin Roosevelt told us. And in that spirit I have to say that little frightens me quite as much as how frightened we seem to be these days.

It’s doing us a huge amount of damage. We’re all worried sick about the Italian economy, so the fearful people with enough money to make a difference start trying to unload Italian bonds, so the yield rises, so it becomes more expensive for the Italian state to service its debts, so the economy gets worse. And yet, at root, the problem is only fear. If we all just said, ‘hey, it’s the Italians, it’s part of their charm,’ and had another glass of Barolo, the problem would be well on the way to resolution.

Exactly the same is true of terrorism. There was lots of fear last week about the fact that the passport officers would be on strike on Wednesday, opening our borders, or so it was claimed, to all sorts of sinister characters. There were calls for passport officers to lose the right to strike.

The 9/11 bombers got into the US through fully-staffed passport control checkpoints. What on earth difference did they make?  The bombers who attacked London on 7/7 2005 were born and bred in this country. They didn’t even need to go through passport control.

Besides, 7/7 cost 52 lives, and there have been no other deaths from terrorism in Britain since. Over that period, nearly 12,000 people have been killed on the roads. So if you’re concerned about saving lives, shouldn’t you start by banning cars rather than limiting the right to strike?

In any case, none of that is the point. The right to strike may be immensely irritating when it’s exercised, but it’s still a fundamental right. Before it was recognised as fundamental, we lived in societies which were significantly uglier than today’s – the occasional inconvenience seems a price well worth paying to block any move back towards those times.

I never tire of quoting Benjamin Franklin, who was bang on the money when he said ‘he who would give up a fundamental freedom for a little temporary security deserves neither freedom nor security’.

This constant striving for safety is bound to fail anyway. I recently quoted Eliza Manningham Buller, former heady of the British Security Service MI5, from her second Reith lecture of 2011. Let’s look at what she said in the third:

‘It’s important to keep a rational perspective on terrorist risk. Bin Laden must have known that 9/11 would make this especially difficult, for at least two reasons: the endless images of the horror, recycled and replayed round the clock by the 24 hour media, and the unrealistic view that society can become risk free. The world is full of risks and dangers, only some of which can be reduced.’

That’s right. Anyone who wants to live in a risk-free world shouldn’t be in this world at all.

So if you’re scared about terrorism, just remember it’s extremely unlikely to affect you. Worried about car crashes? Don't, you're probably not going to be involved in one. As for anxiety about the Euro, bear in mind that stoking up the general sense of panic may make the very thing you fear more likely.

Not perhaps an answer to our woes,
but a great palliative

So my advice? Relax. Chill. Open that bottle of Barolo and set about emptying it. You may do the Italian economy some good, and yourself a lot more.

When the spooks get it right...

Once again I’ve had the experience of having to reconsider some of my fondest convictions. This time I had my lesson from Eliza Manningham Buller, former head of the British security service, MI5, in one of her BBC Reith lectures this year.

Ex-spook chief with remarkable insights

The unease that comes from feeling personally targeted came when she referred to those sceptics who tended to see security and freedom as opposed, with her firmly on the side of the former. That was, I shamefacedly had to admit, certainly my position, to classify among those inclined to limit rather than to defend liberty.

Her view is that there is no contradiction between security and freedom. For her, MI5’s mission is to protect both. As she pointed out, twice to stress the point, the stated objective of the organisation is to defend parliamentary democracy.

Within this general framework she made two specific points that struck me particularly.

On the use of waterboarding by the United States, she said ‘torture is illegal in our national law and in international law. It is wrong and never justified.’

Like quite a few opponents of the use of torture, I’ve tended to argue that it doesn’t generate good intelligence. She on the other hand believes that it sometimes does, but points out that the argument that lifesaving intelligence was sometime obtained by it, ‘and I accept it was, still does not justify it. Torture should be utterly rejected even when it may offer the prospect of saving lives. I am proud my Service refused to turn to the torture of high-level German prisoners in the Second World War, when, in the early years, we stood alone and there was a high risk of our being invaded and becoming a Nazi province. So if not then, why should it be justified now?’

It was chastening to listen to her. The argument over whether torture is effective or ineffective is irrelevant – it’s quite simply wrong. Turning to a utilitarian justification only weakens the moral argument, which is more than strong enough on its own.

As it happens, though, she comes out with something close to a utilitarian argument herself, almost as an afterthought.

I believe that the acquisition of short-term gain through water-boarding and other forms of mistreatment was a profound mistake and lost the United States moral authority and some of the widespread sympathy it had enjoyed as a result of 9/11. And I am confident that I know the answer to the question of whether torture has made the world a safer place. It hasn’t.

Giving up the moral high ground weakens us and attracts more recruits to the ranks of our enemies.

But Manningham-Buller made another point that struck me almost as strongly and much more personally. It concerned the rule of law. She declared:

The Security Service Act of 1989 was long overdue - the government of Mrs Thatcher was not, at first, convinced of its necessity - but its importance was critical. The Service’s experience of working on a proper legislative basis has been wholly positive. But even at that early stage in 1989 we knew its importance.

Like most people, I would have expected the spooks to do all in their power to resist legal oversight. So it was a bit of a surprise to find that Manningham-Buller was, on the contrary, only too pleased to have a proper legal framework for her work.

Funnily enough that chimed with a personal experience of my own, though not perhaps at quite her level.

My work involves using large quantities of healthcare information, often including confidential material about identified patients. Following a series of scandals some years ago – you know, the usual things: lost USB keys, stolen laptops, all the mundane disasters that can happen with unsecured data – regulations were so massively tightened that it became almost impossible to do my job.

Recently, though, good sense has prevailed. Regulations have been revised and intelligent procedures put in place. People have realised that there is no point in having a system so restrictive that it’s impossible to do the very things they regard not only as legitimate, but actually necessary for the sake of good healthcare.

For instance, a key thing when looking at how an individual case has gone is to be able to look at other cases for the same patient – but that means knowing who the patient is, which in turn means working with ‘patient identifiable data’, the very stuff the regulations had originally made inaccessible.

The problem's been met by setting ways of doing things that mean that, as long as we stick to rules about who can see what, how it needs to be handled, how long it is kept and so on. And, funnily enough, I find it surprisingly relaxing to work that way: I know that what I’m doing is within the rules, it isn’t going to expose me to any unpleasant consequences with the law, and at the same time it’s making sure that patient confidentiality is preserved. 

And since, in other conditions, I’m a patient myself, I’m really rather happy about that last point.

So it’s good to be able to say with Mannigham-Buller that my ‘experience of working on a proper legislative basis has been wholly positive’. I know what she means.

On the bigger points, though, about the morality and nature of a security service – well, I can’t claim to have anything like her insight – only, despite myself, to rather admire her point of view.