Photograph of alleged torture by Argentinian authorities in the 1980s, during President Raul Alfonsin's democratic rule. EPA/EMPICS
Some of the explicit and implicit claims governments have made to avoid the charge of torture.
Torture may extract vital information
In some circumstances, perhaps. However, in reality the ‘ticking time bomb’ scenario featured in thrillers is vanishingly rare; very few detainees have information which is valuable enough, and needed urgently enough, to justify using torture. In any case, under torture most people will rapidly say whatever the torturer wants to hear. Ironically, torture may appear to be most successful when it is most worthless.
It’s an emergency
According to the UN Convention Against Torture, ‘no exceptional circumstances whatsoever’ justify torture. Alone in Europe, the British government has declared that a state of emergency exists, allowing it to detain terrorist suspects without trial (although not to torture them). The Egyptian government declared a state of emergency in 1981, against the threat of Islamist militancy; it is still in force, and torture is common.
They don’t deserve any better
In 2002 the US government declared that its Al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners were not prisoners of war but ‘unlawful combatants’, depriving them of the protection of the Geneva Conventions. The effect is to allow the US to detain its prisoners indefinitely, and to remove the obligation to treat them ‘humanely’. However, the phrase ‘unlawful combatant’ does not appear in the Geneva Conventions; many international lawyers argue that the Conventions do in fact cover the Guantanamo detainees.
It’s not really torture
US intelligence has devoted extensive time and effort to devising interrogation techniques which they claim fall short of qualifying as torture. However, this is not a humanitarian strategy: the accounts of Guantanamo survivors suggest that the cumulative effect of the treatments used there is just as traumatic as that of conventional torture. In any case, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights forbids both torture and ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’. Human rights groups say ‘torture lite’, Guantanamo-style, is illegal as well as immoral.
