PETER HITCHENS: My late brother agreed to be waterboarded to see what it was like. He would have been appalled by how we’ve become so inured to torture as seen with Moscow terror suspects
Are we not disgusted or shocked by torture any more? I have been amazed by how little protest or complaint there has been against the obvious, repellent savagery unleashed by Vladimir Putin’s state on the alleged perpetrators of the March 22 terror attack.
In this outrage, at the Crocus City concert hall near Moscow at least 139 people died and 180 more were injured.
On Sunday night, the four alleged terrorists were paraded before TV cameras in a Moscow courtroom. They had plainly been severely handled. One had a bandage crudely slapped over his ear, or where his ear had been. Another was in a wheelchair. One of his eyes may have been missing. He was clad in a hospital gown, which was open to show a catheter.
It was not hard to work out why they looked like this. Film of them being tortured had somehow reached ‘social media’.
The New York Times explained: ‘One of the most disturbing videos showed one defendant … having part of his ear sliced off and shoved in his mouth. A photograph circulating online showed a battery hooked up to the genitals of another… while he was being detained.’
One of the alleged terrorists in the mass shooting at the Crocus City concert hall was paraded on Russian TV with a bandage over his ear
Far worse details are obtainable, for those who wish to know them. I advise against looking for them.
The aim of all this is obvious. To deter future terror attacks, and to assuage the anger of the Russian people, among whom emotions have understandably run high.
But some Russians still realise they have gone too far. Putin’s urbane personal spokesman, Dmitri Peskov, a member of Moscow’s educated elite, declined to comment on the torture. He must now realise beyond doubt what sort of regime he is speaking for, and what it is capable of.
We, in the West, surely still feel that we ought to be above this sort of savagery. Confessions must not be extracted by torture. Trials must be fair.
So why hold back, as we seem to be doing, when Russia breaks the rules in this gruesomely boastful way? The Russian Federation is now quite openly a lawless torture state, publicly and shamelessly operating outside the moral limits we normally apply to governments.
President Putin is already widely and accurately denounced as a sinister tyrant, my own preferred term for him. Russia’s brief attempt to become a liberal democracy is plainly over.
Western people in general do not hesitate to denounce the Kremlin’s behaviour in most other matters. But in this bloodstained bragging it has gone far beyond the bounds of what is permissible and is proud of what it has done.
But why are we not more appalled? Are we, too, happy to abandon our civilisation because we are angry, precisely when we need it most?
I well recall the national wave of fury at the time against (for example) the 1974 Birmingham IRA pub bombings. There was a burning desire to see the culprits found and punished, with many openly regretting the comparatively recent abolition of hanging.
Shamefully the suspects, whose convictions were later overturned, were in several cases beaten quite badly in custody. This was shocking and wrong. But at least the British government did not then deliberately display the beaten men to TV cameras.
On the contrary, they tried to hide these events, as well they might in a country which in those days prided itself on its supposedly civilised police and fair trials.
Since then we have been beguiled by TV thriller series such as 24, in which US special agent Jack Bauer (played by Kiefer Sutherland) repeatedly made the case for torture in practice.
In 2014, a report by Amnesty International UK concluded that more people in Britain believed torture was acceptable than in Russia – partly thanks to 24 and other popular TV shows such as Homeland and our own homegrown Spooks.
My late brother Christopher, who was generally in sympathy with the Iraq War, became so concerned by reports of waterboarding being carried out by the US that he volunteered to undergo the punishment to demonstrate that it could be considered torture
Does this explain why, when you might have expected a tempest of Western horror at the graphic reports of the treatment of the Moscow suspects, there hasn’t really been one? There should be.
I think this is because, after the mass murder of September 11, 2001, centuries of civilised restraint were put to one side in a red mist of rage, which still hasn’t lifted.
I also think this behaviour was a mistake, practically and morally. Torture does not work, and if you too have torture chambers, what exactly is it that you are defending when you go to war against despots?
Yet, after 9/11, memos circulated at high levels in Washington that coyly allowed ‘enhanced interrogation’, including waterboarding. This is in fact deliberate drowning – not simulated, but actual. In 2008, my late brother Christopher, who was generally in sympathy with the Iraq War and on good terms with members of the George W Bush administration, became concerned by such methods.
He courageously volunteered to be waterboarded. His description is still available on the internet, and I recommend it to anyone. It is characteristically witty and also highly graphic.
The actual moment was ‘as if a huge, wet paw had been suddenly and annihilatingly clamped over my face. Unable to determine whether I was breathing in or out, and flooded more with sheer panic than with mere water, I triggered the pre-arranged signal and felt the unbelievable relief of being pulled upright and having the soaking and stifling layers pulled off me’.
His conclusion? ‘If waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.’
People will say anything to make this stop, and of course they do. For those tempted by the ‘ticking-time bomb’ argument for torture – that a suspect can be mangled into giving away key information that may prevent an outrage – he quoted the advice of Malcolm Nance, a US Navy veteran and distinguished counter-terror expert
He said: ‘Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.’
A massive blaze is seen over the Crocus City Hall on the western edge of Moscow, where at least 139 people died and 180 more were injured
Another unanswerable opponent of torture was the late Senator John McCain, a former US Navy pilot horribly mistreated by the North Vietnamese after being shot down and captured. Even while dying, in the late summer of 2018, he doggedly opposed then President Donald Trump’s nomination of Gina Haspel as head of the CIA.
Mr Trump, who believes torture works, eventually appointed Ms Haspel, who had worked at one of the CIA’s notorious ‘black sites’ in Thailand. US media have reported that she took part in the agency’s ‘extraordinary rendition programme,’ under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by CIA personnel.
And this is our side in the great war for civilisation. How has it come to this? England formally abolished torture in 1640. It was cruel, and it did not work. You may choose your reason for opposing it, moral or practical, but I really think we should protest more loudly against an abomination, which is unspeakably foul for those who undergo it, and which corrupts and scars those who inflict it.
