In 1898 Rudyard Kipling, the laureate of imperialism, wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, the future President of the United States, urging him to show leadership on "the Philippines question".
In 1898 Rudyard Kipling, the laureate of imperialism, wrote to Theodore Roosevelt, the future President of the United States, urging him to show leadership on "the Philippines question". Kipling then wrote "The White Man's Burden" with its view of dealing with "fluttered folk and wild - new caught, sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child," and he forwarded his poem about the "savage wars of peace" to Roosevelt.
A century on we no longer accept the arguments about our fellow global citizens being lesser species to be dealt with as we will, with illegal incarceration, cross-border trafficking and torture as legitimate practices on our part because in some ill-defined way we mean well. There is no "meaning well" when it comes to some actions.
That is the clear message of the Senate Intelligence Committee's report into the practices of the CIA which has been the subject of a furious rearguard blocking exercise by the Agency and former senior figures all the way up to former President George W. Bush.
But the senators have stuck to their guns.Torture is torture. Not "enhanced interrogation". Torture. And it is wrong at so many levels we are astonished that the point still has to be made. The first is the moral point. Western Governments have to hold to the higher moral ground. That may seem ethereal when masked, black-clad men are beheading hostages, but it's not. Moral ground is what fuels and enables our wider policy work and this is territory we abandon at our peril.
Second is the practical and tactical point. Torture simply does not work. Under torture or "enhanced interrogation" the person being questioned will give up almost any information, real or imagined, to end the torture. Why put yourself on the wrong end of a global debate about morality, for the sake of something which is known to be useless?
Kidnap and torture is wrong, no matter that you have rebranded it rendition and enhanced interrogation. The US has braced itself for potential terrorist acts around the world on the basis of the publication of the long-awaited report. But that is not a justification for its suppression. It is a justification for using the contents of the report to inform and reform planned future policy to avoid this ever happening again. As The Herald argued in the past "the phrase extraordinary rendition is a disturbing example of the use of official jargon to conceal an unacceptable truth." So too is the use of the phrase "enhanced interrogation" to describe torture.
Let us be clear. That torture has been committed as part of the post 9/11 "War on Terror" is not in doubt. Leaving aside the ludicrously disconnected and illegal invasion of Iraq, the whole skewed response led to the Twin Towers atrocity led to Guantanamo Bay and to secret prisons round the world. This included one identified by the European Court of Human Rights in Poland. There has also been the involvement of US allies in rendition flights, almost certainly including the use of Scottish airports.
President Obama has still not closed Guantanamo and he has also tried to block the publication of the Senate report or water it down. Judgment will be, as Kipling observed: "Cold, edged with dear-bought wisdom, the judgment of your peers."
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