News in the Struggle Against Torture

There have been a number of important articles during the last few days on the subject of torture. U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan, in his speech for International Human Rights Day, declared that torture is not an instrument for fighting terror, but rather is itself an instrument of terror. Meanwhile, British playwright Harold Pinter, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, has blasted U.S. torture practices.

In addition, British courts have ruled against the use of any confessions derived from torture as evidence. This is not to punish the interrogators who obtained the confession, but rather is based on the fact that people will say anything at all under torture, true or false. The information is thus totally unreliable. Our own courts of law held this to be true, until the recent case of Abu Ali, an U.S. citizen tortured in Saudi then turned over to the United States. His “confession” was allowed as evidence and he is facing many years in prison as a result.

Meanwhile, a particularly interesting article, "Qaeda-Iraq Link U.S. Cited is Tied to Coercion Claim" came out recently in the New York Times. The article states that a detainee named Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi had initially given good information, but that after he was sent to Egypt and tortured, he gave false information about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

If we look back to a number of earlier articles, it is clear that a major split between the FBI and the CIA began with the treatment of Mr. Libi. The FBI had used their time-tested methods, not torture, and felt that Mr. Libi was starting to cooperate. Hence the good information. Later, the CIA arrived, taped up the detainee, insulted and humiliated him and sent him to Egypt to be tortured. Hence the false information, which lead us to war in Iraq. If there was ever a case that proved the madness of torture, this is the one.