Cabbages & Kings: Torture report

“Suspicion was a fairy
With a cyber-sifting wand
Suspicion had a licence to kill
Suspicion was James Bond
Suspicion knew no logic
Sister of Jealousy
Suspicion wove its
tangled web
To trap the bumble bee…“
From The Akela Kela
by Bachchoo

In my school the bullies would get hold of your forearm with both hands, grip your skin tight and twist their hands in opposite directions saying “tor-churrrrr…” as they subjected you to the pain. This “game” was called “Chinese Burns”. I assume it originated in a British belief that this was a Chinese method of torture.

As a teenager I heard of the Indian police torturing their victims to extract confessions from them. I knew a senior Parsi police officer, a friend of my family, who had ordered the torture of some gangsters in a rural Maharashtrian district, one of whom had died during interrogation.

The policeman had to undergo a long trial for murder. I can’t be certain but I think the Parsi officer had the rich father of his girlfriend organise lawyers for his defence and ultimately got him off the charge by bribing the judge and prosecution.

This friend of the family continued to visit our house and though my aunts and uncles enquired about the progress of the case there was no mention of torture and perhaps even a tacit assumption that the victim, himself a presumed murderer, deserved what he got.

The American Senate produced a report last week exposing the widespread use of torture by the CIA after the bombing of the Twin Towers on “9/11”.

While we referred to the schoolboy Chinese Burns, which would leave the skin bruised, as “torture”, the American Central intelligence Agency referred to their extreme and cruel practices as “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

The Senate report is a bold and candid exposure of the incidents of the torture of detainees within the US and in Iraq, Afghanistan and places to which the detainees were sent in a process referred to as “extraordinary rendition” another grotesque euphemism for illegal deportation to places where the suspects would be tortured and/or executed.

The report was initiated by the White House and the Senate in order, they claim, to admit to this wrongdoing and breach of international law and agreements and “restore” the reputation of America as the land of liberty, opportunity and of law and order.

The publishing of the report was accompanied by assurances that this was not a partisan effort by Democrats to point the finger at the previous Republican administration.

Leading Republican Senator, John McCain of Arizona, himself a victim of torture at the hands of the North Vietnamese Army during the Vietnam War, supported the exposures of the report and testified that in his opinion torture could never be justified and the information obtained by it was by definition unreliable.

Some of his fellow Republicans and some ex-CIA officials claimed that torture was necessary to extract information from terrorists and thus keep the world and its citizens safe.

The report anticipated and undermined this reasoning. The monster Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) responsible, on one of several counts, for the kidnapping and murder of journalist Daniel Pearl was “waterboarded” 183 times. After two of these sessions perhaps the 127th he gave the CIA information about a looming terror attack on Heathrow Airport, London.

Tony Blair, the then Prime Minister, deployed soldiers and armoured cars to prevent the attack and this operation seemed to have prevented it. Only, there was no such terror plan.

KSM subsequently informed the CIA that he had made up the confession in order to escape further torture.

It is probably true that the victims of torture will contrive to say what the torturer wants to hear or will possibly believe.

In the 1990s, Channel 4 TV commissioned an observational series on a Pakistani police station. The series was called Karachi Kops and the camera crew observed the operations of its force over several months.

The policemen and officers soon accepted the cameras and crew as part of the furniture and went about the normal operations of the police station without fear or caution.

The station handled cases involving drug trading, hit-and-run accidents, murder, terrorism and petty theft. The camera captured their enhanced interrogation techniques which included suspending naked prisoners upside down and beating them, tampering with their genitals and other brutality.

The series was aired with a caption saying “No humans were harmed during the making of this series”.

Some Pakistanis in Britain objected to the series exposing these enhanced interrogation techniques, while the Police Academy in Pakistan asked the producer for a copy and the right to show it during their training programme. We never found out whether they wanted it as an exemplar of how to do policing or how not to do it.

The Pakistani Senate has not written a report critical of police techniques. Nor for that matter has any arm of Indian democracy.

No Indian, including Prime Minister Narendraji, can doubt that the Indian police and security forces use torture as an interrogating technique.

I can tell stories of political detainees I knew being interrogated during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency with their hands on the floor under the legs of a chair on which their questioner sat the lasting proof being their crippled hands.

The US Senate’s motive in owning up to their Army and agencies using torture is to regain some reputation for behaving in a civilised way.

Apart from the daily questioning of suspects in police stations, it has been alleged that the Indian security services use “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees suspected of Naxal activity and on Kashmiri militants.

Perhaps in the interests of demonstrating that Indian civilisation not only invented Quantum Theory and organ-transplant techniques but was also compassionate, civilised and sophisticated in its interrogation techniques, Narendraji or the Rajya Sabha should begin a thorough enquiry into possible enhancements of interrogation. Even John McCain says it never yields anything useful.