Torture: The Guantanamo Guidebook; Is Torture a Good Idea?

Short abstract

Torture: The Guantanamo Guidebook. Channel 4, 28 February at 11 05 pm

Rating: ★★★★

Is Torture a Good Idea?. Channel 4, 28 February at 8 pm

Rating: ★★★★

Ever wondered what it's like to be detained in Guantanamo Bay? Seven British volunteers, including several Muslims, were given the chance to find out, courtesy of Channel 4, as part of a week-long series of programmes on torture. Reporting to a specially equipped ware-house, they were ambushed, hooded, kidnapped, shackled, caged, and subjected to a range of Pentagon approved interrogation techniques that included sensory deprivation, “sleep adjustment,” religious and sexual humiliation, and severe physical pain. But Torture: The Guantanamo Guidebook was no Big Brother-style reality show. This was a serious attempt to examine the effects of torture on the body and the psyche, and to bring home to viewers the kind of interrogation techniques that are being employed in the US-led so called “war on terror.”

“Tonight we recreate 48 hours in Guantanamo Bay,” announced presenter Jon Snow, better known as the face of Channel 4 News. “All the interrogation methods you see have been officially sanctioned by the US government and used to fight the war on terror.” Using military manuals and declassified US government documents, Channel 4 had installed cages, interrogation rooms, and surveillance equipment to simulate Guantanamo's conditions and methods. But the volunteers, who had their own clothes torn and cut off and replaced with the trade-mark orange boiler suit, could not experience the full horror of the real Guantanamo, where the detainees range from teenagers to the elderly. “That would be too dangerous,” said Snow. So, if the real Guantanamo practises what US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld has described as “torture lite,” then this was going to be “torture lite” lite. Hardly.

Snow warned us, “What you are about to see is both shocking and upsetting.” And so it was. Channel 4's torturers were a squad of former US army guards and interrogators, and definitely not to be messed with. These men seemed to know what they were doing. They had all the moves, the taunts, the carefully targeted sadism. They knew about short shackling, about stress positions, about subjecting detainees to white noise and uncomfortably hot and cold extremes (known, euphemistically, as “environmental manipulation”), and about what is termed “scenery up, scenery down”—making detainees move cells to disorient them and stop them making friends with their adjacent cellmates. They forced volunteers to urinate in their boiler suits. And they knew well what physical effects to expect from all this.

The temperature in the cells was kept at 6°C. One volunteer, a 49 year old, who at the start of the programme had said that he approved of what was happening at Guantanamo, soon had to be withdrawn as he was suffering from hypothermia.

Could such methods ever be justified in a world post September 11, Snow asked. The programme did not answer this directly, but let the volunteers—who were visibly distressed, even though they knew it was all an experiment—give their own verdicts. Two pulled out before the end, including an Oxford student of dual American and British citizenship who had originally said that the ends could justify the Guantanamo means but who, after his “Guantanamo” ordeal (which at one stage made him vomit in his cage), felt that such methods were unacceptable. His fellow detainees were equally critical of “torture lite,” including one other who had previously thought there was a case for it.

This was the sort of programme that made me wonder why we aren't all marching in the streets demanding regime change on either side of the Atlantic—especially given that there is no independent evidence that what is happening at Guantanamo and US torture centres elsewhere in the world has so far prevented any terrorist attacks.

This idea was further explored in the earlier programme, Is Torture a Good Idea? The British lawyer Clive Stafford-Smith, who has spent 20 years defending prisoners on death row in the American Deep South, set out to explore the question “Does torture work?” Stafford-Smith has also represented British prisoners held at Guantanamo and he described visiting them as “worse than visiting death row.” “How can America have come to this?” he asked (but some might say that a country that imprisons almost 1% of its people has shown form).

Figure 1.

Stafford-Smith: they have ways of making you say what they want to hear

Credit: CHANNEL 4

Stafford-Smith interviewed people who had experienced torture from both sides, including a former CIA officer and some British expatriates who were tortured by the Saudis and then confessed to a murder that they hadn't committed. The message was clear: there is no evidence at all that torture is anything other than a completely point-less activity. One torture victim said, “I'll tell them anything they want to hear.” As Stafford-Smith discovered, the torturer doesn't get the truth but gets what he wants to hear from the person he is abusing, and governments don't get the intelligence gold dust that would compensate for the public relations catastrophe of places such as Guantanamo.

Doctors are of course among those who are left to pick up the pieces once the torturers have made their marks. Since it was founded in 1985-6, the UK Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture has had more than 38 000 survivors referred to it for help. Given that the UK and US governments are now aping the behaviour of the tinpot dictators they so publicly decry, that number looks likely to swell.