Helmintholog

Would it help explain the issues to make a film in a prominent torture supporter is kidnapped and waterboarded, on video, until he agrees to say that he, not Monica Lewinsky, gave Bill Clinton a blow job; also that torture is wrong; that waterboarding isn’t torture and that he was right to vote for it?

After this statement has been made, and played back to him, and he has signed it, all on camera, you bring on a third party, and explain that the Senator will have to perform with them some degrading act, on camera, and then say once more that waterboarding isn’t torture, that he was right to vote for it — that is, unless he wants the treatment to resume … I don’t think it would be necessary to film much after that. .

It might work. It might, of course change nothing. If American voters really thought their enemies could be humiliated that badly, would they just be delighted to have that technique as a weapon?

This is a Worm’s Eye column from November last year:

Everyone knows that in Stalin’s Purges between 1935 and 1940 perhaps fifteen million people died after various forms of torture. It is less known that throughout this Terror the Russian secret police — first known as the NKVD, and then as the KGB — were were directed by men who confessed, at their trials, to being agents of the British government. This was felt by many Western observers to be completely ridiculous. After all, by the time the purges were over, it appeared that practically everyone on the Soviet government in 1934, and not just the men who ran the secret police, had been taking their orders from foreign governments, and from Trotsky in Mexico too. This couldn’t, surely be true. Yet it is true that while millions died in silence or even defiance, hundreds of thousands of wreckers and saboteurs went to their graves protesting their own guilt. In the dock, in front of the horrified and astounded observers, some from the Western press, they proclaimed themselves guilty on every unimaginable charge.

Some contemporary journalists believed them, most notably Walter Duranty from the New York Times, who won a Pulitzer for his reporting, and wrote that “The future historian will probably accept the Stalinist version”. The American ambassador to Moscow. Joseph Davies, reported to his supererios from the show trial that there was “proof … beyond reasonable doubt to justify the verdict of treason.”

The only evidence for these confident verdicts was confession. As Robert Conquest, the great historian of the Terror, wrote: “A case in which there was not only no evidence against the accused, but they also denied the charges, would clearly be rather a weak one by any standards. In fact, confession is the logical thing to go for when the accused are not guilty and there is no genuine evidence. “

So how were the confessions obtained? For years we have believed that the answer was “torture”. But reading Conquest or Solzhenitsyn today, this seems less certain. Both of them list the methods used by the KGB — Solzhenitsyn has 28 in his, yet both say that few of these were in themselves torture. Here are five methods used by the KGB to extract their confessions:

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.
2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.
3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.
4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.
5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.”

If the translation sounds unfamiliar, this is because it is indirect. Though all of these methods are listed in both Conquest and Solzhenitsyn, I took this particular list from the CIA. They are — according to ABC News — five of the “Enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the CIA in secret camps on prisoners detained without trial or any other contact with the outside world. There is a sixth method, of simulated drowning, which even the KGB did not use.

These are the methods described last week by Mr Bush’s appointed head of the CIA as “a variety of unique and innovative [techniques], all of which are legal and none of which are torture”.

Solzhenitsyn, reviewing their effect of these tortures, wholly unoriginal and completely illegal even when practised by the KGB, asks mercy for their victims. He, who suffered terribly himself, does not condemn anyone who cracked: “Brother mine! Do not condemn those who, finding themselves in such a situation, turned out to be weak and confessed to more than they should have. … Do not be the first to cast a stone at them.”

Neither should we. But there is one small point of justice here. The purpose of these tortures is to extract confessions, or, as the CIA calls them, “vital information”. And if they are effective then we owe Stalin’s ghost a huge apology. Orwell, Koestler, Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, and all the other enemies of Communism were slanderers.

If torture works, the truth means nothing and all the heads of the KGB under Stalin were really working for British intelligence and Leon Trotsky too. And if you find that hard to believe, consider the only alternative: that the men currently directing the American government in its fight against evil are themselves now taking their instructions from the other side.

I thought I could not longer be shocked by the hatred and depravity of the usual crew of dhimmitudinous liberal al-Guardianistas who will see nothing good in any of the actions of this administration. Typically, they are screaming in their chestless womanly way about the way that congress has voted to legalise torture and abolish habeas corpus. It never occurs to them that this is a far-sighted move towards lasting peace. Since, as everyone knows, the terrorists hate us for our freedoms, how can we hope to end the Global War on Terror unless we remove the freedoms that they hate us for?

I’ll be astonished if any better defence of this crew is ever put forward, and delighted if it is put forward at the Hague.

Tim Garton Ash, in the Guardian today, concludes by saying:

At this pivotal moment, we who live in the rest of the world, beyond the Washington beltway, also face a choice. We can watch like spectators in the cinema, as a real-life Terminator 4 unfolds before our eyes, and then walk home, at once titivatingly appalled and self-huggingly reassured in the certainty of our own moral superiority – until, that is, we are blown up by a jihadist bomb. Or we can try to reinforce the nascent shift in Washington by ourselves helping to develop better ways than guns and missiles of dealing with a militant Iran, the awful consequences of the misbegotten Iraq war, home-grown terrorist cells and the other real dangers that threaten us even more directly than they do the current inhabitant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

And who are this “we” he addresses? If anything I could say or do or write had any influence in Washington I’d feel a little better. But of course it doesn’t. So perhaps the piece is addressed to the British governing classes. But they are of course doing whatever is in their power to find a way of coping with the consequences of the Iraq disaster; and they are very well aware of the threat of Jihadi terrorism. Nor, in any case, does Washington take any notice of them, either. I like Tim, and admire him greatly. But he’s not very realistic about the power of intellectuals in modern America.