Rolling back the human rights clock

Amnesty International will place Britain firmly in the dock on Monday as "the most influential and aggressive promoter in Europe" of the policy of returning detainees to countries where they may face torture. This policy, which Britain has pursued since 1992, of repatriating people who it believes pose a risk to national security, is based on insubstantial assurances from other governments that they will not be tortured. It has always been the most transparent of excuses for a tactic which doesn't give a damn for the interests and rights of the individuals concerned, but concentrates on an "out of sight, out of mind" philosophy, which might be convenient for the British government, but is potentially lethal for its victims. Many of the countries that have given such assurances routinely practise torture on prisoners and the idea that these pledges are worth even the flimsy paper that they are written on is a despicable fraud. It is being worked on those least able to take care of their own interests and is a transparent attempt to evade the international responsibilities laid on the government to take due regard for the safety of refugees and political exiles, whatever it may think of their political principles. Britain is, of course, not alone in adopting this callous and evil practice.

Amnesty makes it clear that it has spread all across Europe and it lists at least 12 countries where it has been adopted and even enshrined in domestic law. There are no words to explain just how dangerous this is to its victims and cases abound where these assurances have been proven to be worthless;and shockingly it's not just in Europe that it has been adopted enthusiastically. In one sense, it's merely the diplomatic version of the "extraordinary rendition" used by the US to transport suspects in the so-called war on terror to countries where they could be conveniently tortured while keeping US hands comparatively clean. The US has also used this diplomatic fiction extensively. Indeed, it was only last week that we reported the conclusion of a "Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty" between the US and Algeria, a country not notorious for its gentle treatment of detainees. This led justice campaigners Reprieve to issue a desperate plea to European countries to intervene to rescue Guantanamo Bay detainee Ahmed Belbacha from deportation and almost certain torture in Algeria. The severity of his plight can be measured by the fact that he is campaigning to stay in the US prison camp rather than face return to Algeria. What appears to be happening is that governments the world over are abandoning civilised standards of behaviour as too onerous for them to apply and washing their hands of these unfortunate individuals.

But, in carelessly abandoning such standards under flimsy legal fictions, they are sabotaging a move to a more humane and progressive set of moral standards that the world has been struggling painfully towards under the pressure generated by generations of human rights campaigners. This campaign has been going on since the darkest days of empire in the 19th century and was showing just the faintest signs of success. That success is now in jeopardy because, with the hysteria and violence generated by the phoney war on terror, the world is steadily moving backwards. Lord knows, it wasn't much progress. But to abandon it now under the camouflage of cheap and worthless paper agreements is to abandon all the civilised values that capitalist countries claim to value and abide by, but routinely betray. We cannot allow them that retreat and that betrayal. It is one retreat among many that are designed to roll back hundreds of years of hard-won progress by the working class and progressive movement and it really is one step too far.

Inside the mind of a terrorist

Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's attempt to blow himself up on Northwest Airlines 253 over Detroit on Christmas Day has generated a stupendous amount of column inches and airtime in the US and British media. While the saturation-level coverage has focused on questions of "who," "what," "when," "where" and "how," it has categorically failed to ask the most important question of all - why? Those hoping that the new messiah of the United States would enlighten the ignorant masses were sorely disappointed when the Democratic president could only offer to "communicate clearly to Muslims around the world that ... the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress." Barack Obama then turned the floor over to his top counter-terrorism adviser John Brennan, who made the blindingly obvious and technically true statement that "al-Qaida is an organisation that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents." As with much of Obama's foreign policy, his inability or unwillingness to articulate why the US is the target of so much terrorism has more in common with his universally reviled predecessor than many of his supporters would like to admit. Of course Bush was always far more crass and simplistic than the smooth Harvard graduate. "America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world," the then commander-in-chief told the US on September 11 2001. Just in case anyone is turning their noses up at "those stupid Americans," we shouldn't forget that immediately after the July 7 2005 terrorist attacks in London, the BBC reported then home secretary Charles Clarke as saying that "those responsible for such attacks simply wanted to destroy democracy."

In contrast Michael Scheuer, the man who headed the CIA unit monitoring Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, argues Islamic terrorist attacks on the US have nothing "to do with our freedom, liberty and democracy, but everything to do with US policies and actions in the Muslim world." So who should we believe? To begin to answer this question, it seems pertinent to look at the reasons those actually carrying out the terrorism give for their actions. Although it has since disappeared down the memory hole, in 2004 bin Laden himself directly addressed Bush's claim that al-Qaida is motivated by a hatred of US freedom and democracy. "Let him tell us why we did not strike Sweden," the al-Qaida figurehead quipped before stating: "We fought you because we are free and do not accept injustice. We want to restore freedom to our nation." What about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind behind September 11 2001 and the man with the dubious honour of holding the world record for the number of times to undergo waterboarding - 183 times according to the US Justice Department. "By his own account KSM's [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] animus toward the United States stemmed not from his experience there as a student, but rather from his violent disagreement with US foreign policy favouring Israel," noted the official 9/11 Commission report. Back to Britain. Last September, the International Herald Tribune reported that the jury at the trial of the 2006 plot to blow up 10 transatlantic airliners were shown martyrdom videos prepared by several of the plotters. "A common theme was that they planned to wreak revenge on Britain and the United States for their interference in Muslim countries, especially the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq," reported the newspaper.

No doubt some readers will be uncomfortable with taking mass-murdering terrorists at their word. But what about testimony from the US government itself? In 2004 the Pentagon-appointed US Defence Science Board explained: "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather they hate our policies." The board elaborated: "The overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided support in favour of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding, even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf states." As someone paralysed in a 2004 attack by Saudi extremists, one presumes BBC security correspondent Frank Gardner has thought a little bit about this topic. In 2005 he told the Commons foreign affairs committee that "al-Qaida could not give a stuff about what Americans do in America. What they object to is Western military adventures in their heartland, whether it be Afghanistan, Iraq, wherever." Robert A Pape, professor of political science at the University of Chicago and director of the Chicago Project on Suicide Terrorism, has written a whole book addressing this question. He concludes that "suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than the product of Islamic fundamentalism." Returning to the case of Abdulmutallab, a recent Associated Press story noted he was "not overtly extremist," however he "was open about his sympathies toward the Palestinians and his anger over Israel's actions in Gaza." In addition Al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula released a video after the attempted attack stating that it was in revenge for two joint US-Yemeni air raids on December 17, supposedly targeting al-Qaida operatives. Yes that's right, the latest recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize personally ordered US air strikes in Yemen, killing 23 children and 17 women, according to local officials.

The enigmatic US novelist Thomas Pynchon once wrote: "If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers." So far the "wrong questions" asked by politicians and the mainstream media have led to the implementation of "the most significant changes to airport security since 2006," according to the Guardian. "Increased pat-down searches, more sniffer dogs in terminals and a step-up in hand luggage inspections" along with "the introduction of body scanners" has been the British government's knee-jerk response to Abdulmutallab's attempted attack. The problem is that these are technical answers to something that desperately requires a political solution. In fact, by ignoring the inconvenient question of "why," the chances are that we are actually making future terrorist attacks on the US and Britain more likely. This is not to suggest that British foreign policy should be decided by the actions of a small group of murderous Islamic extremists. Rather it should radically change because it is immoral, hypocritical and has directly caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, many of them in the Islamic world. Put simply, reversing US and British backing for Israel, withdrawing from Iraq and Afghanistan and ending our Machiavellian support for undemocratic Arab regimes is the right and moral thing to do. A welcome by-product of implementing these sane and humane policies would be a decrease in the hatred directed against the US and British in the Islamic world - and therefore a significantly reduced terrorist threat.

Torture won't halt terrorism

There's a single word in a recent Foreign Commonwealth Office report that underlines a central myth used to justify torture. Responding to recent revelations that the British security services had colluded with shocking abuses, the Annual Report on Human Rights 2009 says: "We must work with intelligence and security agencies overseas. Some of them share our standards and laws while others do not. "But we cannot afford the luxury of only dealing with those that do. The intelligence we get from others saves British lives." I'm struck by the word "luxury." It implies that human rights are like shopping at Waitrose - all very nice in good times but in tough times, Tescos will do. I thought the point about "rights" was that they are inviolable - while evidence has been seeping out about torture for some years, the case of Binyam Mohamed has clarified exactly how the US government treated its detainees. Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan where he was tortured by the Pakistan Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and then taken by US agents to Morocco where he was tortured for 18 months by the Moroccan authorities and simultaneously interrogated by the CIA. Then it was on to US detention centres in Bagram and Kabul where he was tortured by various means - sleep deprivation, continuous and literally maddeningly loud music, hooding - and finally to Guantanamo.

His account shows that the US practised torture directly and sub-contracted some of it out to other governments. Mohamed's account, accepted as true by British and US judges, has confirmed accounts from other detainees. The Bush government never denied that it practised "torture-lite" but was much more uncomfortable with the actual details being made public. The British security services knew that Mohamed was being tortured. Their agents questioned him in Karachi after having been formally told about his treatment by the CIA. When Mohamed was being tortured and interrogated in Morocco some of the questions referred to information from the British security services and his answers were passed back to Britain. British security services didn't themselves cut Mohamed's genitals with a scalpel but they knew of the torture and threatened him if he didn't "co-operate." They were happy to be involved in the interrogation process. British citizens Salahuddin Amin and Zeeshan Siddiqui each describe being tortured by Pakistan's ISI and then questioned by MI5. Human Rights Watch quotes ISI agents as saying that in both cases MI5 knew that the men were being "processed in the traditional way" and were "grateful.".

The FCO justification is therefore a surprisingly honest statement of actual practice. British security services are prepared to turn a blind eye to torture. The problem for the government is that the law is unequivocal - torture is absolutely prohibited both under long-standing common law and the European Convention on Human Rights. The government is caught in a cleft stick, which is no doubt why it is refusing to publish its guidelines on torture. For most of us, the moral case against torture is sufficient. The deliberate infliction of pain on an individual is absolutely and indisputably wrong. When private individuals torture another human being, it's illegal and horrifying. But for proponents of torture, the legal and moral arguments are mere luxuries and they constantly fall back on the "ticking time bomb" argument in which human rights "liberals" are condemned for not condoning the ill-treatment of one person when it will - or might - save the lives of thousands. They see themselves as the pragmatic ones and the life-savers. The ticking time bomb scenario is staple fare all the time in film and TV programmes such as 24 and Spooks and you're likely to come across at least one during any night's viewing. We are all very familiar with the scenario and it's that familiarity through fiction that allows the torture proponents to get away with telling us that the scenario is real.

But in the real world, no-one can point to an actual ticking time bomb scenario because presumptions underlying it are false. The security services don't usually know that a terrorist attack is about to happen or who might know about it. They didn't know about September 11, despite the US having Zacarias Moussaoui in detention for immigration offences at the time. Moussaoui was subsequently convicted of being part of that conspiracy. But since the CIA didn't know September 11 2001 was about to happen it had no reason to interrogate someone detained for other reasons. International terrorism like most serious criminal activities depends on hardly any of the players knowing the full story, especially not the actual perpetrators. Who knows what most of the September 11 2001 hijackers knew in advance? Or what the London bombers knew before the morning of July 7? What we do know is that torture produces unreliable evidence. This seems obvious - people being tortured tell their torturers what they want to hear. So the detainee eagerly assents when asked if there's a bomb in London and the spooks go haring off on a wild-goose chase. In fact the bomb was always in Paris.

Evidence obtained under torture is so inherently unreliable that its substantive value is always nothing. How could anyone identify scraps of truth - if there are any - among the fiction invented to please the torturer? Torture proponents will argue that each of those presumptions simply requires better security work. But the point is that each presumption is so unrealistic that the overall scenario is utterly far-fetched. Which is why it has never happened. Were the scenario to be realistic, then surely it would have happened at least once. But I have never heard a torture proponent able to point to one instance. I appreciate that security services can't talk about terrorist attacks that they have prevented, but surely some example would have leaked out given the current debate? There is simply no example of torture preventing a ticking time bomb. And while nobody can point to one instance of lives being saved as a result of torture, what is clear is that the US and British government's war on terror has made us less safe.

Guantanamo, torture, uncritical support for Israel and the invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq are all reasons why some people come to believe that terrorist attacks can be justified. Renouncing torture is a pragmatic position as well as a legal and moral one; it makes us safer. Withdrawing from Afghanistan, providing reparations for Iraq and supporting the rights of the Palestinians would also help. Practising torture - and colluding with it - doesn't just fail to detect terrorism. It also helps to make terrorism more likely. It's of some comfort that MPs and peers obviously feel just as worried about the issue, since they consistently revisit the issue in committee, even though they appear to lack the courage to do anything more direct within the various Houses of Parliament. And it's quite proper that they should feel worried, since the provisions of the anti-terror legislation consitute the biggest erosion of civil liberties in living memory, with the possible exception of the Tory - and now new Labour as well - anti-union laws. It's an unfortunate fact of political life in bourgeois democratic Britain that, when it comes to restricting human and civil rights, the temporary and short term seem to metamorphose effortlessly into the long term and the long term into the permanent.

Parliament's joint committee on human rights clearly recognises this and has called for a review of all such laws passed since September 11 2001. The committee rightly questions whether ministers can legitimately still argue that a "public emergency threatening the life of the nation" remains. And it further says that the government's "narrow" definition of complicity in torture is "worrying." Too right it is. And so is detention without charge, continual abortive attempts to extent the period of such detention, trials without publicly displayed evidence, trials without juries, derogation from aspects of the European Convention on Human Rights and all the rest of the panoply of repression which has become the norm of government over the last decade. The committee says that it is pleased to see that ministers claim that a commitment to human rights "underpinned" counter-terrorism work, but it said "all too often" it was "squeezed out by the imperatives of national security and public safety." Perhaps someone ought to warn these MPs that "all too often" is hardly a sufficient evaluation. Maybe it ought to be a building worker, because at least he or she would be able to remind them that, if just one part of underpinning is "squeezed out," the wall is likely to collapse and, if one wall falls down, the whole house is likely to collapse with it. The civil and human rights that used to be taken for granted in Britain are under extreme threat. Those rights, fought for by working people over hundreds of years, are not negotiable.

It was always obvious that the phoney "war on terror" would raise these dangers. Indeed, there are conspiracy theorists around who say that it is so convenient for a repressive government to have such an excuse that it may have been among the reasons for promoting the phoney war in the first place. While not going that far, simply because we're not in the habit of making assertions unsupported by concrete evidence, it needs to be remembered that many of the vicious repressions of nazi Germany were justified on the basis of allegations that an invisible enemy was eating away at society. Socialists have always been aware of this danger, which is one reason that the defence of civil rights is so high on any progressive agenda. And it is time that we reminded the MPs and peers in the two Houses of Parliament that it is not sufficient to merely sit on the sidelines and comment wryly on the erosion of liberty in the country. Nor is it enough to warn the government that it might have gone a teeny weeny bit too far. If the case is made, and the human rights committee has made it adequately, then it's the task of MPs to get off their behinds and do something concrete about it. Otherwise the committee system ceases to be of any democratic value and merely acts as an escape valve to let MPs air legitimate grievances and feel that they have done their duty, without actually changing anything.