(This is a current extract from the Patterns of Power Repository. An archived copy of this page is held at https://www.patternsofpower.org/edition02/7241.htm)
No State has torture as part of its published governance framework, but many use it – sometimes citing the need to protect the population against a dangerous threat. As it is outside the framework of governance, torture is classified here as the State’s use of Self-Protection. Torture cannot be classified as necessary violence. Its proponents argue that it can help to uncover the truth, either to foil an opponent’s intentions or to find out who is guilty of a crime, but there are powerful arguments against its use:
· The moral arguments against it include breaching the victim’s most basic rights, the dehumanisation of the torturer and the degrading of the moral authority of the society which indulged in the practice. A country which sub-contracts torture to another by the practice of ‘rendition’,[1] in order to avoid breaking its own laws, merely adds hypocrisy to this list of criticisms.
· In the eyes of most people it is so abhorrent a practice that any suggestion of it happening is a very powerful force in recruiting support for the victim’s cause. Anyone whose friend or relative has been tortured is likely to feel a visceral hatred towards the country responsible.
· There is reason to doubt whether it is effective as a means of eliciting information that can be relied upon.[2] A victim can be persuaded to say anything – so answers merely reflect the torturer’s agenda.
The use of torture undermines a government’s legitimacy, as measured by its support for human rights (6.3.7).
© PatternsofPower.org, 2014
[1] On 7 December 2005 the BBC web-site had an article entitled Rendition: Tales of torture, which listed several allegations of American use of rendition to have torture carried out in other countries; the article was available in May 2014 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/4502986.stm.
America's use of 'extraordinary rendition' can now be seen as being institutionalised with the appointment of John O. Brennan to be the director of the CIA, as reported by The American Prospect on 14 January 2013 in an article entitled Embracing the Legacy of Torture; the article was available in May 2014 at http://prospect.org/article/embracing-legacy-torture.
[2] A December 2006 report, entitled Educing Information: Interrogation: Science and Art, included a study on the reliability of evidence obtained under torture. It compared some deprivation techniques which were used on prisoners during the Iraq conflict to those used in the mediaeval Catholic Inquisition, and commented that:
“The results of interrogations conducted under these conditions were just as unreliable as those in the 13th century.
…..In essence, this is why Educing Information: Interrogation: Science and Art in is so important and timely. Its conclusions demonstrate that the entire field of educing information needs critical reexamination; there are no easy answers or generic solutions when it comes to understanding these highly complex behaviors.”
The document was available in May 2014 at http://www.fas.org/irp/dni/educing.pdf. The quotation comes from p. 26.