Quotes by Gareth Peirce

Several years ago Tony Blair attempted to deport an Egyptian human rights lawyer who had been the victim of truly terrible torture in his own country: Blair argued that an assurance from Egypt of the man’s safety would suffice. Unusually, during a court challenge to the legality of his detention, private memoranda between Blair and the Home Office were made public. Across a note from the Home Office expressing concern that even hard assurances given by Egypt were unlikely to provide real protection against torture and execution, Blair had scribbled: ‘Get them back.’ Beside the passage about the assurances he wrote: ‘This is a bit much. Why do we need all these things?’ The man succeeded in his court challenge, but today, on the basis of secret information provided by Egypt, he is the subject of a UN Assets Freezing Order managed by the Treasury. He has no assets, no income and no work, and can be given neither money nor ‘benefit’ without a licence. ‘Benefit’ includes eating the meals his wife cooks. She requires a licence to cook them, and is obliged to account for every penny spent by the household. She speaks little English and is disabled, so is compelled to pass the obligation onto their children, who have to submit monthly accounts to the Treasury of every apple bought from the market, every bus fare to school. Failure to do so constitutes a criminal and imprisonable offence.

[After 9-11], Blair bulldozed through Parliament a new brand of internment. This allowed for the indefinite detention without trial of foreign nationals, the ‘evidence’ to be heard in secret with the detainee’s lawyer not permitted to see the evidence against him and an auxiliary lawyer appointed by the attorney general who, having seen it, was not allowed to see the detainee. The most useful device of the executive is its ability to claim that secrecy is necessary for national security. Each of the dozen men snatched from his home on 17 December 2001, and delivered to HMP Belmarsh, expressed astonishment: first at finding himself the object of the much trumpeted legislation and, second, at discovering who his fellow detainees were. Each asked why, if he was suspected of activity linked to terrorism, he had never been questioned by police or the Security Services before it was decided that he was a ‘risk to national security’.

...Each man was told that, for a reason that could not be disclosed, he was in some unspecified way thought to be linked to unspecified persons or organisations, in turn linked to al-Qaida.

The first to bring news from the dark side, Shafiq Rasul, who returned from Guantánamo in March 2004, relived his experience for an entire month in his lawyer’s office, demonstrating to an illustrator with chains borrowed from a nearby market stall the forms of torture that he had endured in Afghanistan and then at Guantánamo Bay. By July 2004 he had produced a hundred-page illustrated account. Every aspect of his detention, every technique of torture used on him, is prohibited as a crime against humanity and yet this, the first account made public from Guantánamo, also appears to have been entirely ignored by the Intelligence and Security Committee when in March 2005 it reported that it had reviewed two thousand interrogations in Afghanistan, Guantánamo and Iraq by British intelligence agents who saw no evil, save for one, who became aware that US interrogators were getting a detainee ready for interrogation by a process that appeared to involve ‘hooding, deprivation of sleep’ and making him stand in ‘painful stress positions’.

For the past seven years the United Kingdom has also shown disturbing indifference to the criticism of international organisations. The European Committee for the Prevention of Torture conducted repeated checks on those interned indefinitely without trial between December 2001 and March 2005. Their observation that those being detained on secret evidence were being driven to madness were ignored; so too was the stinging critique of the European Commissioner for Human Rights. The government carried on with the detentions to the bitter end, months after the House of Lords had declared the legislation to be in violation of the fundamental provisions of the Human Rights Act. Similarly, the concerns the special rapporteur expressed in his report this year appear to have remained unread. Is arrogance the reason that criticisms can never correctly apply to the UK? Are they only for others?

In 2008, the UN Human Rights Committee, reporting on the compliance of the UK with its human rights obligations, focused on what it saw, rightly, as our particular vice: secrecy. The Official Secrets Act, it stated, has ‘been exercised to frustrate former employees of the Crown from bringing into the public domain issues of genuine public interest’. It recommends that state organisations should ensure that their ‘powers to protect information genuinely related to matters of national security are narrowly utilised’. Similarly, the special rapporteur considered that the rule of law here is endangered by a power shift towards intelligence agencies that acts ‘precisely to circumvent . . . necessary safeguards in a democratic society, abusing thereby the usually legitimate secrecy of intelligence operations’.

The special rapporteur reporting to the UN General Assembly in February this year on ... the promotion and protection of human rights and freedoms while countering terrorism picked out the UK for having interviewed detainees held incommunicado by the Pakistani ISI (they were being held in so-called safe houses and tortured) and for its active participation, through the sending of interrogators or questions or intelligence personnel to witness interrogations, in actions that violated the rights of detainees. The rapporteur considers that such behaviour ‘can be reasonably understood as implicitly condoning such practices’, and that ‘the continuous engagement of foreign officials in some instances constituted a form of encouragement or even support.’ The rapporteur states that ‘the active or passive participation by states in the interrogation of persons held by another state constitutes an internationally wrongful act if the state knew or ought to have known that the person was facing a real risk of torture or other prohibited treatment, including arbitrary detention. This, of course, is what has been staring us in the face in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay.

In August 1971 British soldiers arrested 342 men in Northern Ireland claiming that they were IRA suspects. To force their confessions, 12 of them were taken to a secret site and subjected to the now notorious five techniques (forced standing, hooding, sleep deprivation, starvation and thirst, and white noise). Most of the men later reported experiencing auditory hallucinations; the interrogators referred to the room used for noise as the ‘music box’, and were aware that the detainees were exhibiting distorted thought processes. The Republic of Ireland took the UK to court in Strasbourg for their use of these methods and Britain gave an unconditional promise never to use them again. And yet since November 2001, knowing that these techniques were being adopted (and even enhanced) in our joint operations with the US, our ministers, ministries and intelligence personnel have behaved as if a blind eye could lawfully be turned while at the same time availing themselves of the same sites and sharing the product of those illegal methods.

It was in Mandate Palestine that British soldiers and police after 1938 subjected prisoners to forced standing, forced sitting and choking with water, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, and suspension. These tortures were clean and allowed for plausible denial; today the interrogation style of the Israeli GSS – called ‘shabeh’ by its victims – continues to draw on them and on the techniques used by the British in Northern Ireland. They include sleep deprivation, positional tortures, exhaustion exercises, exposure to extremes of temperature, the use of noise and ‘chair’ torture. It is from these and their predecessors that the Americans have drawn for the last seven years.

The tortures of which it is impossible that UK officials were not aware, those which have characterised US treatment of prisoners in Afghanistan and Guantánamo, belong to families of torture descended from Western European and particularly British military punishments. Those who have categorised these things place them in the ‘lesser’ tradition of stress torture; not because they are less painful, but because they leave less of a visible mark. Long-term restraint in virtually any position will produce agonising muscle pain. Forced static standing causes ankles and feet to swell to twice their size within 24 hours. To move is to be in extreme pain; large blisters develop; the heart rate increases and some people faint. The kidneys eventually shut down. Prisoners suspended by the wrists have their feet touching the ground so that the weight is shared between feet and wrists, but this serves only to increase the time prisoners may be suspended, extends the pain and delays the infliction of permanent injury. That matters in what is known as stealth torture.

What needs to concern us in Britain is this: while those first images put out by the US military in January 2002 gave a glimpse of what the US was doing... here we remain almost completely in the dark about the part played by our intelligence services, and in turn by our Foreign Office and our Home Office and our ministers. There are no dramatic images to jolt us into comprehension and there is no release whatsoever of the information that US citizens claim it as their right to know. Yet we were there at those sites of unlawful confinement; in many cases it was we who told the Americans where to locate British nationals and British residents for rendition; it was we who provided information that could be and was used in conditions of torture; and it is we who have received the product.