Torture: from regress to redress

Torture: from regress to redress
Neal Ascherson discusses "Torture: Does It Make Us Safer? Is it Ever O.K.?: A Human Rights Perspective" (New Press/ Human Rights Watch, 2006)


There was once a Religion of Progress. Can there be a Religion of Regress? I can't find another word to describe this strange sensation of sliding backwards which must afflict anyone with a middle-aged memory. It's like sitting in a train which begins to move in the wrong direction, and seeing again through the window landscapes and buildings passed long ago on the onward journey.

Here once more are orthodox "bankers' economics", which had been discredited seventy years ago. Through the window reappears the notion of the poor as physically degenerate, whose breeding should be discouraged. Here again comes charity, as the proper way to help the less fortunate, and the right of the rich to buy better education, and the warnings that public services undermine virtuous self-reliance. And here we unbelievably are, settling down to discuss the morality of torture as if we lived in the 18th century.


How on earth, after so many international conventions outlawing physical or mental torture in all circumstances, did we get back to this? The answer is that White House and Pentagon jihadists raised this issue from the grave. As James Ross writes in this book, "the September 11th attacks on the United States and the resulting 'war on terrorism' have resurrected the previously unthinkable topic of the legitimacy of state torture".

Of course, the conventions did not remove torture from the world scene. It is still practised by interrogators and police in dozens of countries, as heartbreaking survivors recount in Human Rights Watch's new book. The "regress" is that societies which are not tyrannies but stable democracies can now begin a solemn debate on torture's rights and wrongs. A few years ago, there would have seemed to be nothing here worth debating. And yet today, a state's wish to inflict agony, terror and spiritual devastation on its prisoners is presentable enough to be admitted into our moral maze.

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http://www.opendemocracy.net/faith-terrorism/torture_3314.jsp