Tony Blair was “appalled” when it was first revealed, some five years ago, that Iraqi prisoners were being tortured in Abu Ghraib. “Nobody underestimates how wrong this is or how wrong this will seem to be,” said the then prime minister. His brother in arms George W. Bush claimed to feel “deep disgust” and declared that his White House would not stand for it. “I do not like it one little bit,” said the then American president. “That’s not the way we do things.”
Oh, but it was the way they did things. And those things were done because they had been permitted and encouraged from the highest levels. Torture was sanctioned by George W. .Bush early in 2002 when he signed the now notorious memorandum declaring that the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war did not apply to members of Al-Qaeda and the Taleban.
As for Blair, he did underestimate how wrong it was. He was never quite appalled enough about torture to remonstrate publicly with his ally in the White House as the Bush administration betrayed the West’s best values and the very causes of human rights and the rule of law that they were supposed to be fighting for in Iraq and Afghanistan. If there is any evidence that Blair used his private face time with Bush to protest about what was being perpetrated in the names of America and Britain, I have never come across it.
From those strokes of the presidential pen flowed the outrages in the cells of Abu Ghraib and the cages of Guantanamo, at the Bagram air base in Afghanistan and CIA “black sites” in Europe and around the world. From that sprang “extraordinary rendition”, the Orwellian euphemism for state-licensed kidnap, and “enhanced interrogation”, the spin-torturer’s way of describing his trade in pain.
We now have confirmation from the government itself. Barack Obama’s attorney-general says America used torture. The armed services committee of the Senate, which recently delivered the most definitive official account of what happened, says America used torture.
In the aftermath of 9/11, a climate was created in which the immoral was presented as moral. This idea gained popular currency in the mass media, notably through “24”, the American television series starring Kiefer Sutherland. Each day we see Jack Bauer (played by Sutherland) heroically thwart a nuclear bomb/bioweapon/presidential assassination plot by using violence to extract information. In its seventh season, now showing on Sky, the opening episode of the latest day suggested that the scriptwriters were accommodating to the new sensibilities of the Obama era. Agent Jack is wanted for questioning about his illegal activities by the FBI. But he is portrayed as the hero again when he defiantly defends his methods before a congressional hearing and the twist is that they need him to save the world again from a fresh threat to America.
But experienced interrogators say that torture is extremely unreliable as a means of yielding solid intelligence and often produces false confessions from victims who will say anything to end the pain. Resources are then squandered in pursuit of fantasy plots.
As Charles Guthrie who served with the Special Air Service (SAS), a special forces regiment within the British Army, and was commandant of the intelligence corps before he became chief of the defense staff, puts it, torture is not only illegal, unethical, ineffective, cruel and counterproductive, it is also plain dumb. “Western use of torture to counter terror has been a propaganda coup for Al-Qaeda and a recruiting sergeant for its global jihad.”
Agent Jack is presented as a moral man compelled to do bad things for the greater good. That is how Bush and Blair saw themselves too. That sacrifice of civilized principles and law in the name of security has been repudiated by Barack Obama. It has also been rejected by the British foreign secretary in his recent speech in Mumbai in which David Miliband declared the “war on terror” to be a mistake.
Yet this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried. Though neither of them was in their jobs when this swamp was created, it continues to suck at both president and foreign secretary.
Even under new management, the United States wants to keep its secrets. Threatened by America with a withdrawal of intelligence cooperation, Miliband has just suppressed the publication of grave allegations about the activities of US and British officials in the case of Binyam Mohamed. In the view of two high court judges, what happened to him “gives rise to an arguable case of torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment”. But Miliband who utterly abhors torture finds himself suppressing a dossier about the crime, doing so in the name of national security, the very invocation used to justify torture in the first place.
Obama has started to dismantle the grisly apparatus created by his predecessor. One of his earliest acts was to order the closure of Guantanamo and reimpose a total prohibition on the use of torture by American agents. The new occupant of the White House seems to hope that this will be sufficient to purge his country’s conscience and clear its name in the world. He shows no enthusiasm for bringing anyone to trial for war crimes, saying: “We need to look forward as opposed to looking backward.”
The British government would also be very grateful if everyone averted their eyes from this dark chapter. In that hope, they are likely to be disappointed.
The Binyam case is far from the only one involving allegations that British agents colluded in torture. We already have an official admission that the base at Diego Garcia was used for extraordinary rendition by the CIA and there is a wide suspicion that it went further than that. Did Blair ever ask what was going on? If he did not ask, was it because he knew he would not like the answer? His own law officers were highly uncomfortable with the legal black hole created at Guantanamo. Charlie Falconer, not only his lord chancellor but also one of his closest allies, tried to persuade his friend to raise his voice in opposition. He failed. “An anomaly” was all Blair would ever say about Camp Delta when he was prime minister.
The true extent to which British officials colluded in torture is yet to be established. In terms of ethical complicity, I think we can already begin to return a verdict. As the God-fearing Blair knows, there are sins of commission and there are sins of omission. “We have condoned with our silence torture committed by others,” says Charles Guthrie, his favorite general.
That was arguably the biggest moral failure of Blair’s premiership.
