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...such methods but also history of counter-insurgency techniques which owed much to French warfare in Algeria. Yet while the lessons of the torturer have been assiduously learnt, what has been ignored is the recent open debate in France on the profound damage done by such institutionalised barbarity both to the victims and to the individuals and regimes that deploy it.
Keywords: Algeria, Counter-insurgency, FLN, Guantanamo, Human Rights, Taguba Report
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Worst of all, our nation, a nation that, to a degree unprecedented in human history, has sacrificed its blood and treasure to secure liberty and human rights around the world now must try to convince the world that the horrific images on their TV screens and front pages are not the real America, that what they see is not who we are. --Senator Susan M. Collins (Republican-Maine), Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Abu Ghraib prison, 7 May 2004
During the months following the al-Qaida attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Bush administration seized on the climate of widespread confusion and fear to push through Congress an unprecedented assault on civil liberties in the name of the 'war on terror'. Hard-liners such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Vice-President Dick Cheney, borne aloft on an apocalyptic rhetoric of moral absolutism--the redemptive mission of the US to save the world from evil--launched America on a neo-imperialist foreign policy path. This Hobbesian assertion of raw military power has increasingly broken away from international treaties and norms. (1) The Patriot Act, passed by Congress on 25 October 2001, enabled the government to arrest and detain indefinitely hundreds of people in secrecy under the vague catch-all of 'reasonable grounds' that they might constitute a threat to national security. (2) Prisoners were held at Guantanamo under degrading conditions of duress, without charge or access to lawyers and were to be hauled before military tribunals in contravention of guarantees to a fair trial under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the US is a signatory. Within this overall shift in US internal and external policy, a particularly troubling aspect was the willingness of journalists, academics and politicians openly to advocate the legitimacy of torture, a barbaric practice in breach of fundamental human rights and international law.
An examination of this debate shows, in particular, how 'torture advocates' developed their arguments de nouveau, reinventing the wheel as it were, without any reference to the huge field of historical, ethical, philosophical and legal knowledge that exists in relation to the practice of torture. This ahistorical political culture is itself a symptom of a dangerous American hegemony, an arrogance of power that is prepared to treat the opinions and experience of other states or societies with disdain, if not open contempt. That amnesia needs to be set against the major and concurrent French debate during 2000-04 on torture during the Algerian war. This highlighted the profound dangers of such forms of violence which, like a gangrene, threatened to corrupt the entire social and political order. Moreover, the techniques of counter-insurgency and interrogation developed by the French in colonial Algeria had a major impact on the formation of US 'low intensity' operations in Vietnam and elsewhere, with terrible consequences for human rights. Yet American torture advocates chose to ignore the lessons of the Algerian war.
The discussion of torture in the US seems to have first been occasioned by the inability of interrogators to gain the cooperation of four suspect terrorists, among them Zacarias Moussaoui, being held in a New York jail following the September 11 attacks. FBI sources began to leak stories that a point might be reached 'where we won't have a choice' but to utilise torture. (3) This immediately generated a flood of media commentary suggesting that, in times of exceptional danger to the 'homeland', it might be legitimate to use torture in order to pre-empt further attacks. Shepard Smith, anchorman on Fox News Channel, asked: 'Should law enforcement be allowed to do anything, even terrible things, to make suspects spill the beans?', while, on CNN's Crossfire programme, the right-winger Tucker Carlson suggested that, under certain circumstances, torture 'may be the lesser of two evils'. (4) Jonathan Alter, the self-proclaimed 'liberal' senior editor of Newsweek, in his column 'Time to think about torture' intimated that desperate times required desperate measures. Following the adage of Chief Justice Robert Jackson that '[t]he Constitution is not a suicide pact', civil liberties and due process, he implied, should not get in the way of national security. While Alter admitted that legalised physical torture was against American values, he added that 'we need to keep an open mind about certain measures to fight terrorism, like court-sanctioned psychological interrogation. And we'll have to think about transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies, even if that's hypocritical. Nobody said this was going to be pretty.' (5) Typically, Alter failed to mention that refoulement of an individual to another country where he or she would be at risk from state violence contravened the international Convention against Torture, ratified by the US in 1994.
However, the doyen of the 'torture lobby' was the Harvard law professor Alan M. Dershowitz, a celebrity after his defence of O. J. Simpson and a self-proclaimed champion of civil liberties. Dershowitz deployed the notorious 'ticking bomb' argument that had been used by General Massu's paratroopers during the 'Battle of Algiers' in 1956-57. On the basis of a hypothetical scenario, in which a terrorist is captured who has knowledge of a primed bomb that will kill hundreds of people within twenty-four hours, it was claimed morally justifiable to torture the suspect to save those lives. Dershowitz developed three dubious premises: that torture is efficacious in gaining intelligence; that it will inevitably (and rightly) be used in an emergency; and, since this is so--and to prevent runaway abuse by security forces --it should be subject to the rule of law, since 'democracy requires accountability and transparency', Torture should be authorised through a judge's issuing of a 'torture warrant'. (6) Dershowitz developed a grotesque utilitarian calculus of levels of non-lethal pain that would leave no 'lasting damage', such as 'a sterilized needle inserted under the fingernails to produce unbearable pain ... [or] a dental drill through an unanesthetized tooth'. (7) Dershowitz was under the bizarre illusion that administering criminal violence to a suspect, who might well be innocent, would become legitimate if brought within the legal system (forgetting the long and sorry history of states that have passed laws to facilitate the worst atrocities, including genocide). It might even serve to 'maximize civil liberties'. However, international law makes it clear that protection from cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment by the state is not negotiable or open to derogation. (8)
That liberals and civil libertarians could go down such a road is symptomatic of the depth of the moral rot that has set into American society. Influential media and academic commentators like Alter, who wrote 'I don't think it helps to have the subject of torture be off limits for nuanced discussion', opened up a dangerous and slippery slope by which torture became normalised, a topic that could legitimately be reviewed with a clear conscience. (9) Press and TV debate helped habituate the general public to the idea of torture, but there are other signs of this poisonous agenda being drip-fed into wider society through the popular mass media. In the second series of the 20th Century Fox TV production 24, a Middle East terrorist cell has planted a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles. Agent Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) has twenty-four hours in which to track down the evil-doers and stop millions being killed. Officially sanctioned torture occurs with regularity throughout the series; in one scene, President David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) is present when a specialist interrogator applies his crafts. As the President turns away from the screaming victim, he notes calmly, 'Everyone breaks eventually'. (10) Hardly surprising, then, that a CNN poll found that 45 per cent of Americans were prepared to condone the use of torture against terrorist suspects. (11)
A peculiarity of the torture advocates is the abstract nature of their arguments, which are developed without any meaningful reference to the past or to US obligations under both international and domestic law. Despite Dershowitz's casuistical attempts to reinterpret the Convention against Torture, (12) a formidable battery of US constitutional and international law bans torture...
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Mapping the attainment of Black children in Britain.(Commentary), October 01, 2004
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