(March 2003)
"Torture" is a dirty word. It went out with Hitler’s Gestapo at the end of the Second World War ... didn't it? ... and only national leaders without principle allow it to happen in their countries these days. And if those countries have signed the Geneva Convention and The International Covenant On Civil & Political Rights, they’re morally bound by the terms of those conventions, which specifically ban any form of physical or mental torture when interrogating anybody, for whatever reason.
Which is a problem for America’s CIA and in particular for President George W. Bush, because the CIA is the President’s own private organisation for "getting things done". He authorises everything they do, they’re answerable directly to him, and they’ll willingly take the blame – in order to protect him – when things go wrong, because the last thing he would want is for the world to think any less of him than they do already. Not only that, but presumably most American people would never condone the use of torture, even if it’s aim was to get information from a suspected terrorist, so in order to "get things done", the CIA have totally done away with torture …. as well as kidnapping, assassination and murder.
Instead, they now only use "enhanced coercive interrogation techniques" when they question terrorism suspects. If they want to whisk someone away to an interrogation centre somewhere in the backstreets of Karachi, they don’t kidnap them any more – they now carry out something called "extraordinary renditioning" (as shown below).
And, of course, with the crime of murder being totally against every convention, they now only utilise "pre-emptive manhunting" if they want to relieve someone of their lives – although during the Vietnam War, the phrase "terminate with extreme prejudice" was the popular way of describing this activity. It achieves the same objective, of course, but in a much nicer way.
And the same goes for "capital punishment" – a nice, clinical phrase that describes state-authorised murder, but a much better way of putting it, and much easier to accept.
The CIA have recently been accused of torturing al-Qaeda suspect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed - accused of being the mastermind behind 9/11 - using a technique known as "waterboarding", which involves taping up the prisoner’s nose and mouth, strapping him to a board and then forcing water into his throat to simulate drowning, and it’s the subject of a U.S. Senate enquiry at the moment. It's alleged that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times over five torture sessions.
But it’s OK, because it wasn’t torture … The CIA says it was an 'enhanced coercive interrogation technique' … and they only destroyed the videotape of the sessions (in direct contravention of a High Court order to retain it) in order to protect the identity of the CIA agents involved, certainly not to dispose of the evidence, which seems to be what people think.
So, it’s plain to see that it’s not WHAT you do that matters, it’s how you DESCRIBE it and although the President himself often appears to have great difficulty in mastering the English language, his underlings at the CIA certainly know how to juggle words about in an enterprising way ... and the fact that they’re not fooling anybody doesn’t seem to matter.
UPDATE - 8th February 2008 (Sydney Morning Herald)
