Currently in the US, debate is raging as to whether treatment inflicted on prisoners detained on suspicion of terror activities was torture. Or whether to even discuss the topic. Candidate Obama certainly used the term ‘torture’, but President Obama seems reluctant to do so. However, Obama has released various documents about methods that could be used to extract information from ‘enemy combatant’ detainees.
The administration of George W Bush employed a posse of lawyers to rewrite legislation to make the practices used at places such as Guantanamo Bay and in Afghanistan legal, or at least justify them. They even went so far as to attempt to deny detainees basic human rights under the Geneva Convention. All in the National Interest.
Historically, US Governments have condemned the use of torture by other regimes, including the very techniques they themselves have recently used, such as waterboarding. They have condemned the Khmer Rouge, and have executed Japanese soldiers who waterboarded US soldiers during WWII.
Opinion in the US seems to be evenly divided on whether the use of torture was justified. However, the way the question is asked may well be biasing this figure. If asked whether it is justified to use torture where the threat is known (for example, authorities believe the detainee knows about a time-bomb somewhere in the city, is it justified to use extreme methods to get that information, assuming the detainee actually knows it), quite a few people would say ‘yes’.
But what would the answer be if people were asked their opinions on the routine application of these extreme methods, in a way ‘fishing’ to try and find out what the detainee knows. And it isn’t even a very good method, because the detainee will say anything to stop the torture, leaving the authorities with a whole heap of information some of which may be true and much of which isn’t. It then all needs to be followed up, which can be very time consuming for little reward.
I find it extremely disturbing that the US administration, leaders of a country that claims to uphold the principles of freedom and sees itself as some sort of bastion of all that is good and proper in the world, believes it has the right to flout international law in pursuit of its own ends. The legal shenanigans used to justify the actions is hypocritical, to say the least. In my opinion, the events of 9/11 were no more or less tragic than those seen regularly in war zones such as Gaza, Iraq, and Sri Lanka. To operate on the belief that the life of a US citizen is more important than that of a Palestinian or Iraqi is the kind of elitist arrogance seen in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.