Simple torture...........

The ‘perfect storm’ over CIA torture is showing no signs of abating.

 

The NYT carries both comment and a raft of letters, a surprising number of them attempting to justify torture on the spurious grounds that ‘if it saves one American from being beheaded….’ Which it won’t.

 

One English correspondent who claims to have been ‘born in 1944 when V1 rockets were falling on London’ says that enemy prisoners were tortured by the British, as if being a small baby at the time adds credence to his view.

 

Well, I was brought up during WW2. I had some personal experience of POWs. Every day for about two years truck-loads of first Italian then German POWs were delivered to my village to build new housing estates as ‘homes fit for heros’. There were no guards. They fraternised openly with the locals. They made toys for us small boys. In the evening the trucks took them back to their camp.

 

In later life I met a fomer POW in Germany. He had been taken prisoner by the 8th Army in the Desert Campaign. He told me that the next three years were the happiest of his life. He had been sent to work on a farm in Essex, lived there, and was treated as one of the family.

 

A while back there was a TV documentary about a Yorkshire village at Christmas 1945. There was a strict ‘no fraternisation’ rule. The villagers ignored this and invited all the POWs to their Christmas dinners, albeit somewhat meagre because of food rationing.

 

In the past 70 years there has not been a single recorded complaint, claim or allegation of torture, although there were hundreds of thousands of Axis POWs in Britain.

 

British intelligence does not do torture. They get their information by more effective methods – guile, deceit and cunning.

 

Senior German officers were not imprisoned at all. They were lodged in comfortable houses where Intelligence was happy to listen to their bugged conversations. The prison camps were also bugged and a vast amount of intelligence was gained. POWs were quite happy to discuss their roles in the Holocaust with their fellow Germans, not appreciating that the intelligence service contained a substantial number of German-speaking Jewish refugees.

 

There is no justification for torture at any time under any circumstances.

 

For starters, it is illegal under both domestic and iternational law. No exceptions, no excuses.

 

For the ‘Land of the free home of the brave’ to condone torture diminishes it morally and brings it into hatred, ridicule and comtempt. The US loses its respectability and standing in the world, and makes its claims to be the defender of democracy seem absurd and hypocritical.

 

And if this is not good enough for the defenders of torture, here is another good reason not to be tempted to use it.

 

It doesn’t work.

 

The victim of torture will tell his tormenters whatever they wish to hear, regardlessof whether it is true or false, simply to get the pain to stop.

 

Even the head of the Spanish Inquisition recognised this when he said that some would say almost anything to get mercy and others would say nothing and die.