[Peace-discuss] Mayor of London: Bush subject to arrest

[C. G. Estabrook]

[The British government detained the Chilean dictator Pinochet on charges of 
torture (until the Blair government could find a way to wriggle out of it). Here 
the Tory mayor of London points out that a fortiori Bush could be arrested on a 
book tour to the UK. --CGE]

Wednesday 24 November 2010
Telegraph.co.uk
George W. Bush can’t fight for freedom and authorise torture
If the West’s aim is to spread the rule of law, it cannot be achieved by vile 
means, argues Boris Johnson.
By Boris Johnson 8:15AM GMT 15 Nov 2010

It is not yet clear whether George W Bush is planning to cross the Atlantic to 
flog us his memoirs, but if I were his PR people I would urge caution. As book 
tours go, this one would be an absolute corker. It is not just that every 
European capital would be brought to a standstill, as book-signings turned into 
anti-war riots. The real trouble — from the Bush point of view — is that he 
might never see Texas again.

One moment he might be holding forth to a great perspiring tent at Hay-on-Wye. 
The next moment, click, some embarrassed member of the Welsh constabulary could 
walk on stage, place some handcuffs on the former leader of the Free World, and 
take him away to be charged. Of course, we are told this scenario is unlikely. 
Dubya is the former leader of a friendly power, with whom this country is 
determined to have good relations. But that is what torture-authorising Augusto 
Pinochet thought. And unlike Pinochet, Mr Bush is making no bones about what he 
has done.

Unless the 43rd president of the United States has been grievously 
misrepresented, he has admitted to authorising and sponsoring the use of 
torture. Asked whether he approved of “waterboarding” in three specific cases, 
he told his interviewer that “damn right” he did, and that this practice had 
saved lives in America and Britain. It is hard to overstate the enormity of this 
admission.

“Waterboarding” is a disgusting practice by which the victim is deliberately 
made to think that he is drowning. It is not some cunning new psych-ops 
technique conceived by the CIA. It has been used in the dungeons of dictators 
for centuries. It is not compatible either with the US constitution or the UN 
convention against torture. It is deemed to be torture in this country, and 
above all there is no evidence whatever that it has ever succeeded in doing what 
Mr Bush claimed. It does not work.

It does not produce much valuable information — and therefore it does not save 
lives. Of course we are all tempted, from time to time, by the utilitarian 
argument. We might become reluctant supporters of “extreme interrogation 
techniques” if we could really persuade ourselves that half an hour of 
waterboarding could really save a hundred lives — or indeed a single life. In 
reality, no such calculus is possible. When people are tortured, they will 
generally say anything to bring the agony to an end — which is why any such 
evidence is inadmissible in court.

In the case of the three men waterboarded on Bush’s orders, British ministers 
are not aware of any valuable information they gave about plots against 
Heathrow, Canary Wharf or anywhere else. All the policy has achieved is to 
degrade America in the eyes of the world, and to allow America’s enemies to 
utter great whoops of vindication. It is not good enough for Dubya now to claim 
that what he did was OK, because “the lawyers said it was legal”. The lawyers in 
question were Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee and his deputy, John Yoo, and 
after a good deal of political cattle-prodding from Rumsfeld et al, they 
produced a totally barmy attempt to redefine torture so as to allow waterboarding.

Pain was only torture, they determined, when it was “equivalent in intensity to 
the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment 
of bodily functions, or even death”. If that is right, it would seem that most 
of the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition would be acceptable to the American 
government. You could beat the soles of someone’s feet; you could pour molten 
candle wax on their extremities; you could even pull their finger nails out 
without infringing those conditions.

How is some tired and frightened American officer supposed to make head or tail 
of this sophistry, late at night in some bleak Iraqi jail? How is he supposed to 
calibrate the pain that comes from an organ failure or death? It is no wonder, 
with orders like that coming from the top, that the troopers misbehaved so 
tragically in Abu Ghraib. They failed to see any moral difference between 
waterboarding their suspects and putting hoods over their heads. They failed to 
see any moral difference between waterboarding them and terrifying them with 
alsatian dogs or attaching electrodes to their genitals. They failed to see any 
moral difference, that is, because there isn’t any moral difference.

That is the real disaster of the waterboarding policy — that we are left with 
the impression that the entire US military are skidding their heels on the 
slippery slope towards barbarism. And that is emphatically not the case. 
Yesterday at the Cenotaph we remembered the sacrifice of men and women not just 
in two world wars, but also in Iraq and Afghanistan. The purpose of these 
conflicts is not so much to defeat “the enemy”, but to defend things we believe 
to be inalienable goods — freedom, democracy and, above all, the rule of law.

I believe that, of all nations, America still best upholds and guarantees those 
things. It would be ludicrous to suggest that the waterboarding disaster, or the 
evils of Abu Ghraib, have set up some kind of moral equivalence between America 
and – say – the murderous Taliban regime, let alone Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. If 
you want to appreciate the difference, remember that the perpetrators of Abu 
Ghraib were court-martialled, and we know about US interrogation techniques 
because of rules on freedom of information. But if your end is the spread of 
freedom and the rule of law, you cannot hope to achieve that end by means that 
are patently vile and illegal.

How could America complain to the Burmese generals about the house arrest of 
Aung San Suu Kyi, when a president authorised torture? How can we talk about 
human rights in Beijing, when our number one ally and friend seems to be 
defending this kind of behaviour? I can’t think of any other American president, 
in my lifetime, who would have spoken in this way. Mr Bush should have 
remembered the words of the great Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who 
said in 1863 that “military necessity does not admit of cruelty”. Damn right.


http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/borisjohnson/8133411/George-W.-Bush-cant-fight-for-freedom-and-authorise-torture.html