George Bush is this week having an extravagantly orchestrated series of meetings with Europe's leaders, designed to show a united front for the creation of democracy around the world. Tony Blair talks of our "shared values". No one mentions the word that makes this show a mockery: torture.
It is now undeniable that the US administration, at the highest levels, is responsible for the torture that has been routine not only, as seen round the world in iconic photographs, at Abu Ghraib, but at Guantánamo Bay and Bagram. Meanwhile, in prisons in Egypt, Jordan and Syria (and no doubt others we do not know about), Muslim men have been tortured by electric shocks to the genitals, by being kept in water, by being threatened with death - after being flown to those countries by the CIA for that very purpose.
How can it be that not one mainstream public figure in Europe has denounced these appalling practices and declared that, in view of all we now know of cells, cages, underground bunkers, solitary confinement, sodomy and threatened sodomy, beatings, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, mock executions and kidnapping, President Bush and his officials are not welcome? Perhaps it's not surprising given the British army's own dismal record in southern Iraq. Why has no public figure had the honesty to admit that the democracy and freedom promised for the Middle East are fake and mask US plans to leave Washington dominant in the area? And why does no one say publicly that what is really happening in the "war on terror" is a war on Muslims that is creating a far more dangerous world for all?
From the flood of declassified material from Guantánamo, from recent reports by the military that reveal evidence of abuse and even deaths at Bagram being destroyed, from the war between the FBI and the CIA about who is responsible for the interrogations, from the utter confusion about who is to be responsible for the prisoners who will never be released, one thing is clear: even in its own terms, the torture strategy is a failure.
A s far back as September 2002, a secret CIA study into the Guantánamo detainees suggested that many were innocent or such low-level recruits to the Taliban forces that they had no intelligence value whatever. You do not have to be a specialist in torture to know that after a short period anyone will confess to anything to stop the pain. Men in Guantánamo have been interrogated more than 100 times - always shackled, always the same questions. No wonder prisoners simply stop answering. No wonder there are so many unconvincing confessions.
Now The Torture Papers - 1,249 pages of government memos and reports, edited by Karen Greenberg, the executive director of the centre on law and security at the New York University School of Law - shows the American government to be guilty of a "systematic decision to alter the use of methods of coercion and torture that lay outside of accepted and legal norms".
The young women interrogators in Guantánamo who put red ink in their pants, then smeared what appeared to be menstrual blood on devout Muslim men, and mocked them by turning off the water so they could not wash before prayers, did not dream up such an idea and send home for red ink. It was policy. Like the wearing of lacy underwear - only - for work sessions, it was designed to humiliate and break men. These reports have come from an army translator, Eric Saar, as well as from prisoners. Lawyer Michael Ratner of the New York Centre for Constitutional Rights, which represents over 100 prisoners, said it reminded him of "a pornographic website - it's like the fantasy of these S and M clubs".
The lack of moral courage that prevents our leaders, religious as well as political, from speaking out against all this is deeply disturbing. Either they choose not to know or, by not speaking out, they tacitly condone it.
Whichever it is, their behaviour is in stark contrast to the dignity of the relatives of the prisoners, or of the returned prisoners in many countries. The care and concern that many of them display to the isolated, the sick, the frightened and the traumatised among the families are a testimony to the very best of the human spirit. If only these were the shared values that Tony Blair liked to highlight. These men are driven by a feeling of responsibility for trying to end the ordeal of those 540 men still at Guantánamo, including six UK residents. Among these are a Palestinian refugee, Jamil el Banna, and an Iraqi, Bisher al Rawi, men who have lived here for 10 and 20 years respectively, have families here, and who the foreign secretary shamefully refuses to bring home from hell.
Victoria Brittain Thursday February 24, 2005 Guardian
· Victoria Brittain, with Gillian Slovo, compiled the play Guantanamomailto:v.brittain@lse.ac.uk
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005
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