Entangling alliances? The UK's complicity in torture in the global war on terrorism

The global war on terrorism gives rise to a range of legal, political and ethical problems. One major concern for UK policy‐makers is the extent to which the government may be held responsible for the illegal and/or unethical behaviour of allies in intelligence gathering—the subject of the forthcoming Gibson inquiry. The UK government has been criticized by NGOs, parliamentary committees and the media for cooperating with states that are alleged to use cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment (CIDT) or torture to gain information about possible terrorist threats. Many commentators argue that the UK's intelligence sharing arrangements leave it open to charges of complicity with such behaviour. Some even suggest the UK should refuse to share intelligence with countries that torture. This article refutes this latter view by exploring the legal understanding of complicity in the common law system and comparing its more limited view of responsibility—especially the ‘merchant's defence’—with the wider definition implied in political commentary. The legal view, it is argued, offers a more practical guide for policy‐makers seeking to discourage torture while still protecting their citizens from terrorist threats. It also provides a fuller framework for assessing the complicity of policy‐makers and officials. Legal commentary considers complicity in relation to five key points: identifying blame; weighing the contribution made; evaluating the level of intent; establishing knowledge; or, where the latter is uncertain, positing recklessness. Using this schema, the article indicates ways in which the UK has arguably been complicit in torture, or at least CIDT, based on the information publicly available. However, it concludes that the UK was justified in maintaining intelligence cooperation with transgressing states due to the overriding public interest in preventing terrorist attacks.     

The Gaza Freedom Flotilla: Ethnographic notes on ‘othering violence’ (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

This narrative recounts the events that unfolded around the Gaza Freedom Flotilla as witnessed by an anthropologist invited onboard one of its ships. It shows a pervasive preoccupation of neocolonial states with Othering violence. This is defined as the ability to transform spaces of liberation and solidarity into spaces of deviation and imprisonment. The choice to be an outspoken participant‐observer opens up novel spaces for reflection and research otherwise left to the sensationalist tendencies of journalism and the propaganda machinery of states. Moreover, acting as witnesses to events such as these, in our professional academic as well as in our personal capacity, could also be a last line of defence against expanding Othering violence.     

No pain,no gain? Torture and ethics in the war on terror

Is the use of torture ever justified? This article argues that torture cannot be justified, even in so called ticking bomb cases, but that in such extreme situations it may be necessary. In those situations, judgements about whether the use of torture is legitimate must balance the imminence and gravity of the threat with the need to prevent future occurrences of torture and maintain a normative environment that is hostile to its use. The article begins by observing that the use of torture and/or cruel and degrading treatment has become a core component of the global war on terror. It tests the claim that the use of coercive interrogation techniques does not constitute torture, showing that similar arguments were levelled by both the British and French governments in relation to Northern Ireland and Algeria respectively and found wanting. It then evaluates and rejects Dershowitz's claim for the legalization of torture and the more limited claim that torture may be permissible in ticking bomb scenarios. In the final section, the article questions how we might maintain the prohibition on torture while acknowledging that it may be necessary in some hypothetical cases.     

The unbearable weight of music: The intermezzo

The affordances of musical experience, its capacity to become our mode of being-in-the-world, especially in ritual situations, can be turned against us into an aversive sonic attack that bends the social arc into a liminality without end, a time in between that goes nowhere. And when this happens, we have entered the realm of music torture, a relatively recent innovation in that dark art that was ushered into the world in full force at the beginning of the 21st century. Music became part of a regime of no-touch torture inflicted upon detainees in the ‘global war on terror’, itself a war without end. In this article, the author argues for an ontomusicology that understands music as ritual and ritual as music – in this case, ritual that inverts Victor Turner’s notion of communitas, with all of its attendant modes of being-with, into a solitary mode of existence with no hope of escape, a musical ritual torture, a perpetual intermezzo.     

Australia,US torture and the power of international law

ABSTRACT

Australia cooperated extensively with the George W. Bush administration during the ‘war on terror.’ However, in doing so, Australia failed to condemn, and in some instances, condoned US torture and detention programs. Does Australia’s conduct demonstrate a failure of international law and human rights to constrain Australia’s actions? Although the Howard government was heavily criticised for failing to uphold human rights in the fight against terrorism, international law was not forgotten. This article argues that international law shaped Australia’s cooperation with the US. Australia strategically used international laws to legitimise its cooperation with the US in the face of evidence of US torture. International law was not dismissed to pursue national security interests but used to legitimise Australia’s security policies.     

When a gamekeeper turns poacher: torture,diplomatic assurances and the politics of trust

Diplomatic assurances are promises which purport to manage the tension between the need for national security and the human rights obligations not to send individuals to countries where they would be at risk of torture. This article looks at how and why diplomatic assurances have become a part of policy efforts to make counterterrorism human rights compliant and as part of a wider strategy for drawing a line under the damaging legacy of the ‘war on terror’. This positive gloss on the use of diplomatic assurances is, however, in contrast to the worries motivating human rights advocates which centre on the implications for the global anti‐torture regime. Behind the doubts surrounding diplomatic assurances is a wider concern, centred on whether the past architects of the war on terror can be trusted to progressively develop the rules and norms governing this domain.     

Human Rights Violations,Corruption, and the Policy of Repression

Quantitative cross‐national research on human rights violations and repression has made considerable progress in identifying and eliminating economic and political factors that influence the use of torture and killing by governments. Warfare tends to increase violations, democracy—notably full democracy—and trade tends to inhibit violations. Where motives have been considered, this research has generally assumed a strategic motivation for government use of repression. Repression is employed to counter threats from the opposition as represented by the presence of warfare. Less attention has been given to the effect of implementation on levels of repression. Theory suggests that agents are likely to make a substantial independent contribution to the level of repression, if given the opportunity. In this article we develop this argument and present cross‐country comparative evidence that suggests that agents’ opportunities for hidden action measured by perceived levels of financial corruption substantially influences the incidence of torture in a political system, after controlling for the strategic motive of governments and the other factors found influential in earlier research. We show that the results are robust and not sensitive to alternative modeling, measurement, and research‐design decisions.     

The return of the state in Argentina

Argentina's economic collapse in December 2001 is seen as perhaps the most emblematic evidence of the failure of neoliberalism to provide sustainable and equitable economic growth in the developing world. A new policy frame has gradually emerged in Argentina which relies on a more active statein the promotion of growth. This article examines what state‐led growth can mean in the context ofopen markets. It explores in detail the policies implemented since 2002 and asks to what extent they constitute a possible route to stable post‐crisis governance.     

HISTORY AND INCOMPLETENESS

Vera Schwarcz's Place and Memory in the Singing Crane Garden examines the moral, philosophical, and historical meanings of a garden built by a Manchu Chinese prince, subsequently destroyed by British imperialists, commandeered by Red Guard radicals, and finally transformed into the grounds of an art museum. Reading Singing Crane Garden in the context of Schwarcz's previous writings on Chinese intellectuals and Jewish traditions, as well as insights provided by critical philosophers and geographers, this essay explores the moral and ethical dimensions of locating history in specific "emplacements". The argument begins by examining the phenomenology of place articulated by Edward Casey, weaves through discussions of Chinese spatiality, embodiment, and garden aesthetics, and comments on Schwarcz's study of broken monuments and stele through comparisons with Classical Chinese writers and the contemporary American poet Louise Glück. Comparisons are made between the destruction of the garden by the British forces of James Elgin, the murder of the journalist Thomas Bowlby, and the purging, imprisonment, torture, and brutality against scholars and intellectuals by the Red Guards under Mao. The essay closes with commentaries on Schwarcz's reflections concerning continuing global atrocities, and new insights into the ways that understanding landscape architecture as a form of history can bring meaning to questions of memory, loss, and the desire to evoke unrecoverable experiences.     

From practice to theory to practice: William Penn from prison to the founding of Pennsylvania

ABSTRACT

Recent scholarship on religious toleration has been marked by a keen interest in the relationship between theory and practice. This essay takes up the genesis of William Penn’s theorizing about toleration in his experience of imprisonment, focusing on four particular episodes during his early years as a Quaker (between 1667 and 1671). These years were formative for Penn as a young man as well as for the increasingly sophisticated movement for toleration in Restoration England. The broader political theory that Penn articulated in England and attempted to realize in Pennsylvania contained economic, political, social, legal, and religious components, worked out in drafts of founding documents over the course of many months. But the foundation of that theory – its unshakeable commitment to liberty of conscience, its faith in juries as a potential restraint on the arbitrary exercise of power by civil governors, its unsteady mix of principled and pragmatic underpinnings – was laid in Penn’s early years as a Quaker, intertwined with his experiences of imprisonment in England and Ireland. In a very real sense, then, the road to Pennsylvania, for Penn, began in the Cork prison 15 years before he set foot in America.     

The selected representation of contested prison history: memorial exhibitions and tourist experiences

The Jing-Mei Detention Centre, Taipei, is one of the primary sites associated with the ‘White Terror’, which took place during the imposition of Martial Law in Taiwan (1949–1987), by the authoritarian post-war regime of Chiang Kai-shek. Taiwan’s intelligence agencies violated civil rights and liberties. Suspects suffered arrest, interrogation, torture, trial, and imprisonment. The former detention centre has become Jing-Mei Human Rights Memorial and Cultural Park, which is one of two penal facilities dealing with the processing of political prisoners and for the suppression of activists who struggled for human rights. This study focuses on the interpretation by visitors of exhibitions at the site and the process of historical representation at the memorial park. The roles of the relevant parties were identified through interviews with former prisoners. The selection criteria, and the approaches to interpretation employed by the exhibition planners to represent a contested history, were examined. An analysis of visitor experiences and interaction with historical interpretation and layout in the exhibition demonstrated the visitors’ disoriented, yet unified, perceptions. A model of prison history has been developed that selects the memories and materials used to depict the past, unifying the multiple layers of histories during the ‘White Terror’.     

Reporting and Interpreting Legal Violence in Asia: The East India Company's Printed Accounts of Torture, 1603–24

This article examines how printed accounts of torture can reveal the ways the law was experienced, interpreted and reported by the East India Company (EIC) during the early decades of the seventeenth century. It will explore how the company came to impose its own interpretation of the law when interacting with local powers and people while simultaneously attempting to adapt to and operate within existing legal systems in early modern Asia. This careful balance—sustaining English law while accepting the restraints of a different legal system—was essential in a region where merchants and other travellers moved through areas criss-crossed with overlapping jurisdictions. Interactions with locals often turned violent, even when under the protection of local states, and the English used legal violence to sustain their position in Asia as much as they were threatened by its use by others. Concepts of how the law operated were far from simple and overlapping legal institutions, customs and ideas resulted in numerous moments of competition as different legal structures were imposed simultaneously. The company was forced to think carefully about these issues when law and violence came together during the most violent aspect of judicial enquiry—torture. To assess how the EIC thought about the law and how this influenced the development of their imperial policies this article will focus on how information regarding the law—in its most extreme application—was reported to an English and European audience through the careful presentation of information regarding events in Asia.

It will focus on two case studies where torture was experienced by English merchants—and where accounts were deemed important enough for reportage and printed distribution. The accounts considered here, reporting the experience of torture in Bantam in 1603 and in Amboyna in 1623, were carefully developed and distributed by the company and intended to effectively present its ideas regarding the law and jurisdiction in the developing world of global commerce and empire. In the first, we see the English factors at Bantam seeking to operate within the parameters of the local rulers but increasingly turning to their own understanding of the law in response to threats. The account of this episode reveals how the company justified the seizure of legal authority through the effective interpretation of both English ideas of proof and their own grasp of international law. The second account covers an opposing scenario, where Dutch merchants seized legal authority over the English in contravention—or so the company claimed—of the law of nature and failing to effectively follow the rules of law regarding proof. Across the two accounts we see how the company struggled to come to terms with the ways it interpreted the law. This is turn defined how it developed policies regarding its role overseas, and the reporting of these legal encounters in England changed the way that other parts of the world and the challenges of international trade were understood.     

Cutting Through Topologies: Crossing Lines at the School of the Americas

Abstract: The School of the Americas (SOA) is a U.S. Army school that trains Latin American military officers. Manuals released detail torture techniques once taught at the school, and thousands of graduates have been linked to human rights abuses. The annual vigil in front of Fort Benning is the largest ongoing protest and civil disobedience against U.S. imperialism being held within the U.S. The movement to close the SOA traces the twisted lines of the topology that shapes spaces of exception in Latin America. It traces those lines back to the SOA, and cuts through them with its own counter‐topographical lines of connection to those Latin Americans that are made into ‘bare life’ by those topologies. This essay looks at the doings of protest space as a form of resistance to the space of exception, and how personal stories, and mourning, can put us beside ourselves, with one another.     

‘Signs of the still recent war’: Medbh McGuckian and conflict

In a review of Medbh McGuckian's poetry, Christopher Benfey maintained that ‘[t]o scan her poems for allusions to sectarian violence would be as fruitless and naïve as to sift Emily Dickinson's poems for references to the Civil War’. McGuckian's work is not often read for its commentary on or critique of violence in Northern Ireland. Indeed, in an interview with John Brown, the poet revealed that ‘I never thought of myself as a “Troubles” poet; it was not part of my oeuvre and I couldn't do it simply as an exercise, so I didn't take it on’. This article tests the validity of her self-assessment by examining poems which borrow from sources focused on conflict, particularly the two world wars. The intertexts allow the poet to explore moments of crisis (due to violence, imprisonment and enforced deprivation) without having to deal explicitly with the more immediate conflict in Northern Ireland.     

Troubling Confessions: Roman Catholicism and ‘The Homosexual Question’

Abstract

Current scholarship on human rights and torture largely ignores places and scenes where extra-judicial violence is routinely practiced. That is, framed within a secular discourse, the agency of religious bodies in the systemic infringement of ‘rights’ is never considered. This paper explores one question with two parts: What are the conditions in church governance (Christian) in which systematic violation of human ‘rights’ is the norm, and in which the production of behaviors very much like torture is made possible, even necessary? Why do such behaviors go unnoticed, or, when they are observed, are they discounted? Using the crisis of homosexual presence within contemporary Roman Catholicism I shall argue that pressure for ‘confessional’ purity produces behaviors and activities within lines of authority that mimic torture. The essay examines documented policies, ecclesiastical directives and procedures concerning the management and treatment of persons (mostly homosexuals and women) during the second half of the papacy of John Paul II (1986-2001).     

A Tale of Two Josephines: Class,Gender and Self‐sovereignty in Gilded Age

Using court records and newspaper accounts, this article analyses the ‘Blann‐Ammon’ controversy in the context of nineteenth‐century liberal feminism. Risking social ostracism and imprisonment, Josephine Ammon, a wealthy and well connected Cleveland matron, sought to defend the legal rights and autonomy of Josephine Blann, her neighbour of working‐class origins; but in her efforts to empower Blann, Ammon constructed perceptions of Blann, and of the case, to serve her own political and ideological purposes. This article suggests the class limitations on both constructions of womanhood and notions of feminist self‐sovereignty.     

The Limits of Bonhoefferian Responsibility: On Jean Bethke Elshtain's (Mis)Use of Bonhoeffer

ABSTRACT

Jean Elshtain claims that her defense of torture draws from the Christian tradition. To defend this claim, she makes direct appeal to Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Her defense of torture has taken on greater political significance today. This article will refute Elshtain's claim to Bonhoeffer. To do so, this article will first point to Bonhoeffer's explicit rejection of torture in Ethics, then argue that Bonhoeffer's rejection of torture draws from themes initiated in Creation and Fall. Placing Bonhoeffer in conversation with David Decosimo will show that Bonhoeffer holds a distinction between relation-ending and relation-perverting acts. Responsible actors may be called to perform the former class of actions, like tyrannicide, in extraordinary situations. However, the latter class of actions, like torture or rape, constitutes a limit to responsible action that we find no evidence Bonhoeffer is willing to cross. Elshtain, and others who wish to provide “Christian” defenses of torture, must look elsewhere.     

Intangible Heritage in Conservation Management Planning: The Case of Robben Island1

Robben Island Museum officially commemorates ‘the triumph of the human spirit over adversity’, relating especially to the period of political imprisonment between 1961 and 1991 when Robben Island was most notorious as a political prison for the leaders of the anti‐apartheid struggle. Robben Island became a World Heritage Site in December 1999 because of its universal symbolic significance—its intangible heritage. This paper explores the implications for conservation management planning of interpreting and managing the intangible heritage associated with such sites. Examples will be drawn from the conservation planning exercise undertaken by the Robben Island Museum between 2000 and 2002. The paper will look specifically at how Robben Island's symbolic significance has been defined and how competing interpretations should be included in the management plan. It then discusses the challenges around managing historic fabric whose significance is defined as primarily symbolic, and ways of safeguarding the intangible heritage associated with it.