We all know that prisoners and detainees in Arab countries are routinely subjected to torture, and hence, I am not usually surprised when I hear than an Arab detainee was tortured on his way to the police station or prison. However, I become very surprised when a democratic nation and a leading country in the field of human rights such as the United States practices torture, and then I find it shameful, or damning of the entire system, that those who ordered the torture are enjoying impunity. This subject has been under scrutiny for years, and the details available are in great accuracy and abundance. However, the accused are not being prosecuted. Instead, they have the audacity to justify their crime, and to say that they would order torture again, if the need arises, as stated by George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. I am writing against the backdrop of the decision of the British coalition government to form a commission of inquiry headed by the retired judge Sir Peter Gibson, to investigate the role of the British intelligence services and MI5 (internal security services) in facilitating and covering up the torture perpetrated by the Americans. Here, the information available is also abundant and some of it is well corroborated: Following the invasion of Afghanistan, a British officer sent his superiors a report regarding the torture of detainees, to which the reply was that he and his colleagues must refrain from torture and must not try to prevent Americans from exercising it. There is consensus on both sides of the Atlantic that torture has indeed taken place. In fact, I can prove this to the reader in the strangest way: I started my career by working in the English language press with Reuters. The etiquette of the profession requires that the accused be called ‘the alleged perpetrator' until he is sentenced, as an indictment alone is not sufficient, since it may end in exonerating him. If the crime is mentioned, it is usually placed between small parentheses, to stress that it has not yet been proven. In contrast, the word ‘alleged' is absent from the news reports concerning the issue of torture in U.S and British newspapers, as are the two small parentheses. I do not know whether the British inquiry will shed new light on the practices of the senior officials in the Bush administration, and whether that will be sufficient to spur a new popular campaign to prosecute those responsible. The problem is the United States itself in the first place, and not Britain. When Barack Obama was a senator, he gave a famous speech in August 2007, in which he condemned torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, and said that this violated American values. After he won the elections, he announced that he will shut down the Guantanamo prison no later than January 22, 2010. However, Obama did not turn his words into deeds, and did not deliver on his promise to close down Gitmo. He even failed to set a new date for this, and yet, he still does not want to prosecute the senior figures of the previous administration as his declared policy asks ‘to look forward'. This means that the page on the eight years prior to his presidency was turned, along with all the disasters they have wreaked upon America and the world. The American media is definitely complicit, as it failed to expose the violations of the Bush administration (for Israeli-related reasons). The media knows that it would also be prosecuted, along with this administration, if all cases were to be opened. The 26th of June, the International Day in Support for Victims of Torture, passed unmentioned by the media, although it marked the day in 1987, when the UN Convention against Torture or Other Cruel, Inhuman and Degrading Punishment or Treatment was issued. This convention was written in such a manner that it appeared as though it predicted the practices of the Bush administration to come, as it mentioned that no exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, may be invoked as a justification of torture. This means that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their senior aides, in addition to the lawyers John Yoo, Jay Bybee and Stephen Bradbury, the authors of the ‘torture memos', must be brought to justice. The information available on torture and the cover up are essentially American, and of the highest level possible. In a study conducted by Harvard University, it was found that 90 percent of the largest U.S newspapers considered waterboarding to be torture between 1930 and 2002, but that in the eight years after 2002, only one to two percent of these newspapers called it torture. Moreover, the Physicians for Human Rights group spoke about experiments being conducted on detainees, which is reminiscent of the experiments on Jews in Hitler's concentration camps. Will the British inquiry succeed in clearing the way for prosecuting those behind torture in the United States and elsewhere? I doubt this, because the powers of the British commission are limited, and it cannot force defendants such as Tony Blair to testify. Also, the Americans are threatening to stop all security cooperation [with the UK], should U.S intelligence information be compromised during the British investigation. The accused politicians are already convicted in the court of public opinion, and even if they are not placed in the dock, the other convicted entity is the alleged Western democracy. [email protected]
