Torture

This week’s Senate Report on the CIA hasn’t settled the question of torture once and for all, as Bruce Anderson has pointed out. When we talk about the heroes of the Resistance, our deepest admiration is reserved for the fighters who didn’t give away their secrets under torture, so the claim that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques did not result in any useful intelligence is rather surprising: it’s too morally neat.

We knew and we knew years ago. Anyone who has been paying attention has known for a long time that the CIA committed appalling acts of brutality in the years after 9/11. Anyone who paid attention has also long known that the agency's torture regime - not too strong a way of putting it - produced very little in the way of useful intelligence. It was sadism masquerading as detective work; depravity disguising impotence and, in the end, the kind of programme that shames a nation. There are still some people who think it fine and dandy, still some people who think it's a lot of fuss over not very much. Still too many people who lack the courage to confront the truth. But we know better than that. We know the truth.

Strangely enough, I was in the middle of writing an article about the tactics used by the RSPCA when another animal charity knocked on my door. A young man holding a clipboard was standing on the doorstep, grinning enthusiastically: ‘Hello! I’m from Battersea Dogs Home.’ ‘Hello,’ I said, ‘I’m a bit busy.’ Exposing animal welfare charities for preying on innocent people. I didn’t say that last bit out loud. ‘I just need to tell you,’ he said, ‘that we’ve got a big fundraising drive because a lot of dogs are being abandoned at the moment. And...’, he paused for dramatic effect, ‘...a lot of them have been tortured.’ ‘Tortured?

Ghadi had spent the past two years on the run from the Syrian regime but it was the rebels fighting against the government, the so-called Free Syrian Army (FSA) who finally caused him to abandon the revolution and flee Damascus. He had made the mistake of speaking out against one of the big FSA brigades running the Yarmouk district of the capital. ‘They are thieves and gangsters,’ he told me. ‘One Facebook post about what they’re doing will get you killed.’ I met Ghadi in a Beirut café, after he had made the long trek over the mountains from Syria to Beirut. Other activists joined us, all bitterly disillusioned by the corruption, looting and kidnapping that has consumed the uprising.

And so, once again, the judges are in the dock for insisting that due process be followed even when, as in the case of Abu Qatada, it is inconvenient to do so. On the face of it, the decision to thwart Qatada's deportation to Jordan seems unreasonable. But the truth is that few of us are in any position to judge the worth of the Jordanian government's assurances that none of the evidence used against Qatada will have been tainted by torture. It may be that, as the ECHR ruled, those assurances are credible (and if so, that's in part thanks to the work of bodies such as the ECHR) or it may be that, as the Special Immigration Appeals Commission has determined, they are not.

The Court of Appeal made a momentous judgment this afternoon. It was hearing the appeal of Rangzieb Ahmed, the first man to be convicted on terror-related charges in this country, for which he is serving 10 years. Ahmed’s appeal was based on the allegation that British security services had been complicit in his torture and that the evidence for his conviction, gained by Pakistan’s ISI, was obtained by a series of extreme measures culminating in the slow removal of his finger nails. The appeal judges rejected Ahmed’s suit, saying that there was no evidence that his nails had been pulled out or that British officers ordered beatings. Ahmed’s claims had been proved ‘not to have occurred’.