Alasdair Palmer, writing in today's Sunday Telegraph:
The pictures, and now videos, recording the activity of some US soldiers inside Abu Ghraib prison seem to provide a definitive answer to the question of whether torture can ever be justified. The answer is an emphatic no. ...On an official level, torture is a topic so mired in hypocrisy and humbug that it is hard to have an honest discussion about it. The US is one of the 127 countries that have signed and ratified the Convention on Torture - a convention that, the judges at the Hague Tribunal have ruled, "signals to all members of the international community that the prohibition on torture is an absolute value from which nobody must deviate". Yet many, perhaps a majority, of the signatories do torture people (signatories include countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Somalia). And it is not just the satraps of barbaric dictatorships who believe that torture can be justified. As Alan Dershowitz, the distinguished American civil liberties lawyer, pointed out, practically everyone accepts that there are circumstances in which torture should be used. There is, for example, the situation where the police know that a man in custody can tell them where a bomb primed to kill thousands is located. Few people, says Mr Dershowitz, believe that torture could never be justified in such a case. ...
At some point, it becomes morally impossible to maintain that an individual's right not to be tortured is so important that it outweighs the certain murder of thousands of others. Torture then stops being the "absolute evil" which the convention says it is. It becomes an evil which sometimes is capable of being the lesser of two abominations - and one which it can be right to choose. That is what most politicians believe. So why have they signed a declaration insisting that torture is "an absolute evil from which nobody must ever deviate"? Often the answer is their capacity for hypocrisy and humbug, but it is not always so and the pictures from Abu Ghraib explain why not.
There is a horribly slippery slope from "humiliation and degredation" to the bestial barbarity of Abu Ghraib - and if Seymour Hersh is right, that is what happened after the US decision to legitimise torture. The only way to stop the slide to the ghastly bottom of that slope is not to get on it. That is the logic behind the absolute ban on torture - and it is a logic that makes sense. ... The effect, however, of an absolute prohibtion on torture will be that terrorist outrages that could have been prevented will happen. Any subsequent deaths may be a price worth paying for preserving our moral integrity. But the hideous grins on the faces of the Abu Ghraib torturers should not allow us to forget that it is the price that will one day be paid.
