The only truth about torture is in our own morally bankrupt stance
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Version 0 of 1. Amnesty International has polled the British people and discovered that nearly a third of us think torture can sometimes be justified. Across the world, the figure is generally higher – except in a couple of countries, most notably Spain and Argentina, which have within living memory passed from being military dictatorships which used torture routinely to democracies which don't. Yet there are also large majorities in almost all countries polled for bans on torture. It seems that it is one of those crimes which we believe should only be committed when we are certain to profit from it; that we believe works but should only be resorted to when all other means have failed. So it is worth examining why and when it works. Torture seeks to make people do what they would rather not – we all know that, from the playground onwards. If what someone wants to do is to keep a secret, torture may make them spill it. But one morally salient thing about torture when it is used as a matter of routine policy, is that it is much more effective at concealing information than it is at extracting it: there are innumerable examples of torture used by occupying armies as an instrument of policy, and the important thing to note is that it seldom works as a way to gain information; it is more successful when used as a way to keep information private by threatening anyone who talks. Take, for example, the British war with the IRA. Both sides used torture, at least intermittently. But while the security forces were trying to get people to talk, the IRA were most often trying to prevent their victims from talking. As Michael McConville testified on BBC Radio 4 recently, the torture worked. After his mother had been abducted in front of him and her other children, the men who a fortnight later dropped off her rings and purse to show that she was dead took him to another house where he was tied blindfold to a chair, beaten, stabbed with a penknife, and had a cap gun let off by his ear. He did not go to the police. Torturing children works, but it does so in ways that only a sociopath will admit to, even to themselves. That is why it is necessary to hide the brutal and squalid reality with a cloak of moralising disgust about informers. There have been, and of course there still are, whole regimes which are propped up by systematic torture. But here, too, it works not so much by getting people to talk as by frightening them into silence. Even when torture is used against torturers, it does not produce the truth. Consider the evidence against the Old Bolsheviks whom Stalin had murdered after the show trials of the 1930s. None of those men were innocent; all had approved the terror when it was their enemies being terrorised, and some, like Nikolai Yezhov, the discarded head of the NKVD, were monsters responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. So it is an extraordinary achievement of Stalin's regime to have them shot for some of the very few crimes of which they were almost certainly innocent. Almost all of them confessed that they had been working, for decades, for British intelligence; many confessed that they had been involved in plots to assassinate Comrade Stalin (on British orders, of course). In fact, it emerged during the course of the purges that every single member of the party's central committee in 1929 except Stalin had been taking their directions from British or Polish intelligence, from Trotsky, or from some combination of these – except the ones lucky enough to die before the trials started. This story ought to give pause to anyone who wants to believe the testimony the Bush government released after torturing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The evidence that he tried to blow up the Empire State Building, Heathrow airport, Canary Wharf, Big Ben and the Panama canal is exactly as good as the evidence that Yezhov and Beria, successive heads of the KGB, had plotted to assassinate Stalin on the orders of British intelligence. Torture is ultimately nothing to do with the truth. It works wonderfully well to compel people to turn from the truth. More often it is a means of forcing people to lie to us under circumstances that compel us to believe them, because otherwise we would have to face the truth about ourselves. |