Untrue Confessions

Did we really need the Senate Intelligence Committee to tell us that the CIA had used 'interrogation' methods that would be characterised as torture if used anywhere else, during the so called 'War on Terror'? It wasn't as if the CIA had been subtle about it at the time - 'water boarding' was being openly discussed in the media at the time. Former Vice President Dick Cheney not only admits that he (and the President) knew about it, but he seems unrepentant about it all, telling the press that the Committee's report is 'full of crap'. The thing that bothers me is the fact that certain sectors of the establishment in both the US and UK seemed so eager to resort to such tactics. The ease with which they were apparently able to reconcile their consciences as civilised members of modern democracies to the idea that it was OK to torture people, gives the impression that they were just waiting for sufficient excuse to drop their civilised facades and justify their reversion to barbarism. I remember those days, in the wake of the September 11 attacks, when such people felt emboldened enough to speak openly about the need to use torture. Most disturbingly, not all of them were kind of quasi-fascist right-wing nut jobs you expect to hold such repugnant views - there were a significant number of so-called liberals who apparently couldn't wait to try and intellectually justify the use of torture against alleged terrorists.

But the use of torture isn't just an affront to human decency, of course. It is also completely useless as a means of obtaining information from suspects. I know that Dick Cheney disagrees, maintaining that intelligence gathered via torture by the CIA helped foil other (unspecified) terror plots, but history disagrees with him. The fact is that many of the methods employed by the CIA, (sleep deprivation, 'water boarding', for instance) aren't so very different from the methods used by the likes of self-styled 'Witchfinder General' Matthew Hopkins to obtain confessions of witchcraft back in the seventeenth century. Clearly, such confessions must have been false - unless we believe in the existence of witchcraft. So, logically, it follows that if you believe in torture as an effective means of obtaining information, then you must also believe in the existence of witchcraft. Sadly, I suspect that Dick Cheney and his ilk might actually believe in witchcraft. But we don't even have to go back to the dark days of the English Civil War for evidence of the fact that torture doesn't work: just look at the number of false confessions obtained by various police forces (resulting in miscarriages of justice) through the use of extreme interrogation techniques. The fact is that most people will confess to just about anything if placed under enough pressure, let alone physical abuse. But, in truth, I think that those who use such practices are well aware of this fact, but choose to ignore it so that they can indulge their own predilections for violence under the justification of 'protecting' the rest of us. They should be ashamed of themselves.