The most bizarre international news this week was the admission by the US that it had used 'extreme interrogation techniques' otherwise known as torture on captured prisoners suspected of involvement in the 9/11 attacks. This admission could not have been more high profile, taking the form of a two hour speech by a lady in the US senate, broadcast in full on CNN - actually Dianne Feinstein, the chairman of the senate Intelligence committee, and the report was the result of a four year investigation, trawling through some 6 million pages of CIA - the US central intelligence agency - documents. In so doing they found ample evidence of these interrogation techniques. Of course, much of this is not new - everyone has heard of waterboarding and seen the pictures of the humiliated prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. Everyone knows that the CIA, once an abstract intelligence gathering organisation, had morphed into a kind of secret police force after 9/11.
The first point was that the CIA had never denied that these 'techniques' had taken place, but had justified them on the grounds that in the wake of 9/11 it was urgently necessary to obtain information from captured suspects to possible future or imminent attacks on the US; the assumption being that such information was obtained, to prevent further attacks, and that the extreme techniques were therefore justified.
But this was exactly what was refuted in the Senate report, which said that no information obtained by torture had been useful or valuable in stopping attacks, and that counter-terrorism intelligence had been obtained by more conventional means. To an ordinary person, this seems obvious - any 'information' obtained under torture is likely to be of low quality - the prisoner will tell the torturer anything he wants to hear. So that even the expedient justification for the extreme interrogation techniques falls away.
The next point is that the report sought to exonerate the previous US (Bush) administration, to some extent, by implying the the CIA ran a 'disinformation' conspiracy which destroyed evidence, emails and tapes, and kept its activities and methods hidden from the President.
The third point is that of course these kind of admissions and disclosures are highly unusual, especially for a major power like the US. (Can you imagine the Russian or Chinese governments coming out with an account apology for mistreatment of inmates in its prisons, let alone treatment of political prisoners, or even admission that they had any? It should have been hoped that these disclosures would be a cathartic experience for the US - one where responsible political leaders from both sides of the spectrum in the US came together, acknowledged previous faults, and vowed such treatment of prisoners would never happen again. It would have captured the moral high ground for the US and redounded greatly to the country's credit. Indeed, John McCain, the former Republican presidential candidate and corm Vietnam vetern who was capture and tortured by the north Vietnamese, made a statesmanlike speech in which he broadly accepted the report's findings and said that the matter was more about us than the alleged terrorists.
Of course, this did not last - immediately the matter degenerated into the usual Democratic-Republican partisan battle, with the Republicans bitterly disputing the findings of the report, questioning its timing (with the Republicans about to take over both houses of the US congress) and claiming that it would put US personnel abroad at risk, although of course US personnel are always at risk from jihadists. The CIA were drawn in, with both the present and previous directors defending their tactics and claiming the interrogation techniques did yield useful information, for instance leading to the discovery of the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. A furious row erupted as to whether former president Bush was fully informed as to what was going on, with his loyal extreme conservative vice president Cheney claiming that he did. So that instead of salvaging the US's international reputation from this episode, it has probably made it worse.
Meanwhile, there is an embarrassed silence from America's allies. Why they must be asking, did the US have to spill the beans? The countries which houses the CIA's secret prisons? Britain, which during the Iraq war, followed the lead in everything the US did, so must have knowledge of the US torture techniques, or even imitated them with some of its own. Calls for disclosures are being made, but Britain has a tradition of bureaucratic secrecy probably surpassing that of every other nation. It has not released a long promised inquiry into the Iraq war, and already the official curtains are being drawn. Back to business as normal.
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