America's dirty torture secret

The Guardian
September 10, 2003
By Henry Porter

Remembering al-Qaida's attacks on America tomorrow, many will wearily note that the world did indeed change that day two years ago and that our newspapers are still full of the reverberations. Without 9/11 there would have been no Iraq war. Without Iraq there would be no Hutton, and without Hutton, TB wouldn't be looking quite as weak as he is.

The American press betrays the same pattern, but there is one important and -to me - astonishing absence. Weeks go by without serious newspapers investigating or commenting on human rights abuses by the American government. At home and abroad, hundreds, maybe thousands, of men are being held in camps and prisons by the military, by the CIA and by the justice department, incommunicado, without legal representation or hope of release, there to endure prolonged and terrifying interrogation. Alone, this is enough for the US government to place itself in contravention of the Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man, which it is obligated to uphold. But that is not all. There is evidence that the US authorities have encouraged the use of torture and may indeed have participated in the torture of those men they believe to hold information on past and future terrorist attacks.

We surely didn't imagine two years ago that this would be an outcome of 9/11 and yet it has happened with such ease, the once rights-conscious American public turning its gaze the other way, along with the self-regarding worthies of the American newspaper industry. The one exception has been the Washington Post, which alone has pressed the US government on the legality of Guantanamo Bay and the processes instituted there, not by lawyers, but the jesuitical neo-conservative mandarins of the Pentagon, and it has gone some way to exposing the "stress and duress" techniques applied to prisoners at the US base at Bagram in Afghanistan.

Researching my book Empire State, a novel set against the background of these abuses, I discovered that the information is not terribly difficult to come by. In March, prisoners at Bagram reported being beaten, deprived of sleep and made to lie naked on a sheet of ice. The same month, US military coroners ruled that the deaths of two prisoners in mysterious circumstances were homicides. Just before the invasion, I met an American who is attached to a shadowy military/espionage operation; I asked him about the rumours of torture. He replied with a look of astonishment, "Are you crazy? Of course. That's the war we've got on our hands. We didn't ask for it this way."

By far the most disturbing development is the American practice of handing over recalcitrant prisoners to be tortured by compliant regimes in Jordan, Morocco and particularly Egypt, where beating, drowning and even electric shock treatment are used.

When a man is transported bound and blindfolded - in the American parlance "packaged" - it is said that he has been "rendered" to a foreign service, and from the unutterable hell of his subsequent experience come "extreme renditions". The desired result of this process is a complete set of answers to questions drawn up by US intelligence that are then fed into a database which, without a trace of irony, has been codenamed Harmony.

Naturally, the CIA officers are not themselves applying the electrodes to genitals or rubber truncheons to the soles of the feet, but in the case of prisoners being tortured in Saudi Arabia, they are on hand, in the words of CIA director George Tenet, to "share the debriefing results".

All of the above may make you think that I have become violently anti-American. I have not - I still love the place and the people - but it is profoundly disturbing that our closest ally has slipped so easily into methods which begin to match the theocratic savagery that launched the 9/11 attacks in the first place.

I also shudder at our failure to act. When confronted with the facts about the treatment of British subjects in Guantanamo Bay, the government fielded Baroness Symons from the Foreign Office, who refused to condemn outright either the lack of rights in the camp or the threat of the death penalty being ordered by a military panel. If she can't see it as her primary duty to speak out against human rights abuses by an ally, what on earth is she is doing in the government?

No to a DNA database
The home secretary, David Blunkett, hopes to announce this month that the identity cards scheme is going ahead with each of us paying £25 for the privilege of a card. So ends the inviolable right to anonymity.

But much worse schemes are afoot. A twerp named Kevin Morris, chairman of the Police Superintendents' Association, is hoping this week to add one more piece to the apparatus of control when he asks his association to call for a national DNA database that will include every man, woman and child in the country.

The seriousness of the threat to individual liberty cannot be underestimated. Once a person's DNA is held by the police, there will be nothing they won't be able to tell about him or her. Every week, our ability to read the 30,000 human genes increases, and it cannot be long before scientists start making assumptions about personality traits from particular constellations of genes. Imagine this capability in the hands of a murder squad desperate to solve a difficult crime. Everyone with a particular profile would become a suspect.

To place this power at the disposal of the police at this early stage in the development of genetics would be a disaster. But maybe we just don't care. As long as our comfort and pleasure are not immediately inconvenienced, we seem to go along with the idea of cars that automatically alert the authorities to speeding, or cameras that log our every movement.

Welcome to the age of the velvet tyranny, where men like Morris are king.

Calling all whistle blowers
It is my personal belief that, having bought their very own Chechnya in Iraq, neither Bush nor Blair will be in office in 18 months' time. The unfolding chaos and dissolution in Iraq should do for both, but a good longshot bet is that Blair will come unstuck on the Hutton inquiry.

When you read all the evidence released by Lord Hutton you do get the picture of a prime minister pushing for a dossier that supported a war agenda that had been settled with Bush in March 2002.

The proof is not yet there, but an awful lot of evidence must exist in the British military about the notice and instructions received by the generals from the government during the summer of 2002.

It would be helpful if whistleblowers would come forward to testify to the military planning prior to the release of the dossier, and thus demonstrate the motives of No 10. Given what happened to David Kelly, I think this is unlikely.

· Empire State, Henry Porter's novel about an Anglo-American counterterrorist operation in the post 9/11 world is published this week by Orion.

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