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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

torture and secrecy « Previous | |Next »
May 23, 2009

In ‘Make sure you say that you were treated properly’ in the London Review of Books Gareth Peirce, begins his article on torture, secrecy and the British state with the images of human beings in rows in aircraft, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic, much as other human beings had been carried in slave ships four hundred years earlier. They are images of anonymous beings crouched in open cages in orange jumpsuits being unloaded at Guantánamo Bay, where it was intended that they remain for ever outside the reach of the law.

Some light has been thrown on these anonymous beings hidden behind the curtain of ‘national security’ --eg. the case of Binyam Mohamed, which begins to uncover part of the truth about the relationship between British intelligence and the Americans and Moroccans, who for 18 months slashed the most intimate parts of his body with razors, burned him with boiling liquids, stretched his limbs causing unimaginable agony, and bombarded him with ferocious sound. In short, they tortured him. Binyam was seized in Pakistan in April 2002, rendered to Morocco three months later, and tortured there on behalf of the US for 18 months. was then held for nine months in Afghanistan, first at the “Dark Prison,” a secret prison run by the CIA, where he was also tortured, and then at Bagram airbase. He has been held at Guantánamo since September 2004. Britain, it is claimed was complicit in his extraordinary rendition and his torture.

Pierce says that:

The opportunity for concealing the extent of our country’s collusion with those who have carried out the actual torture is increased by three factors: first, the nature of most of the techniques used (‘stealth methods’, so called); second, the choking powers of secrecy available to our government; and third, the haphazard way in which information about these matters emerges, when it emerges at all, which hampers our ability to ask the most basic questions.

Like the Australian state Britain still, in 2009, appears to have the greatest difficulty in admitting that what was done routinely in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay was torture, and even greater difficulty in admitting that they knew all along that it was happening.

Pierce says:

Once we have arrived at a position where acquiescence in crimes against humanity by our government may well have occurred, the state can no longer demand that we acknowledge it as our protector and assert that in consequence the nation’s security is at stake if secrets are revealed. This after all is the thesis on which the claim for secrecy is built.

He adds with respect to Britain:
Where we have got to is this: we have a state whose devices for maintaining secrecy are probably more deeply entrenched than in any other comparable democracy. We are condemned for what is already known internationally by the most authoritative of bodies about our activities in the past seven years, activities that are at the very least indicative of criminality, but we appear to be paying little or no heed. Our government’s lawyers are fighting as hard as they can to preserve the secrets of the secret state, however disgraceful; to preserve them in large part because they would occasion disgust in the country, and not for the endlessly repeated claim that they will affect the safety of the realm or paralyse our legitimate democratic allies.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:28 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

How Pierce can add "with respect to Britain" is a mystery.
All we have seen of Britain through hundreds of years of colonising by whatever means considered necessary and plundering of other countries wealth and culture makes the picture crystal clear.Many have their eyes closed.