Digging for truth – Journalist Ian Cobain speaks about reporting on torture

Ian Cobain

If you define Britain by its oft lauded stereotypes, one may assume a peaceful, upstanding nation which obeys rules, regulations and notions of fair play. Yet for 30 years Ian Cobain has dedicated his life to exposing the secrets, the lies, the inconvenient truths often buried deep beneath a British façade.

An investigative journalist with the Guardian newspaper, his reports into the UK’s counter-terrorism practices since 9/11 have won a number of major awards including the Martha Gellhorn Prize and the Paul Foot Award for investigative journalism, as well as a range of Amnesty International awards.

In 2012 Ian published his first book, Cruel Britannia, which analysed how the British government has repeatedly and systematically resorted to torture, through years of British colonial rule, to World War Two and to the War on Terror.

And while we may not like to think of it, torture is something which Ian believes is still practiced by the UK and other Western countries often perceived to be upholding human rights.

“I’m still shocked by some of the matters I discover. But I’m no longer surprised,” says Ian.

“After 9/11, I knew by January 2002 that the US was mistreating its prisoners. Photographs showing shackled men, in gloves, ear defenders and blacked-out goggles, being dragged across the ground at Guantanamo, were published by the US military. That was a pretty good clue [that torture of prisoners was happening].

“The same month, while I was in Kabul, Red Cross officials told me that prisoners were being tortured at Kandahar. I was terribly shocked. The British government and its intelligence agencies claim they didn’t discover this for years. What nonsense.”

A report on the condition of detainees in 2012, ten years after Ian learned of torture in Kandahar, still lists the southern city in Afghanistan as one of the areas where detained individuals are routinely mistreated by officials.

“At the time it was difficult to comprehend that the British government would draw up policies that resulted in the torture, but that’s what happened,” Ian explains.

“It took me a while longer to understand the level of UK support and participation in the rendition programme. More time made me realise that the UK was complicit in kidnappings and torture during operations in which the US barely played any part.”

For Ian, the ill-treatment by the UK of those in detention, particularly in situations of conflict, is nothing new.

“British military processed and mistreated their prisoners in Northern Ireland in 1971 in precisely the same way that another generation of the British military was doing it in Basra in 2003,” says Ian.

“Authorities use it to intimidate, to coerce, to humiliate, to extract information, or to obtain so-called confessions. But it also creates reservoirs of hatred that don’t run dry for generations. And nobody can quite predict what will flow from those reservoirs.”

Hostility though is something that Ian has felt from authoritative figures, many of whom try to deter his work and the work of human rights defenders across the globe.

“Some people are hostile, but I don’t really care. I’ve been threatened once or twice, by people in ‘authority’, but I’m not in any danger,” he says.

Documenting and exposing torture is a sensitive issue for everyone involved. While the journalist or human rights activist exposing a case of torture might be in danger of reprisals, the survivor risks that and risks re-traumatisation by retelling the experience. However, documentation enables victims to prove the veracity of their allegations and thus increases the pressure on perpetrators to fulfill their obligations under international law. Torture is hardly a positive representation of a group or a country, particularly one like the UK.

Rehabilitating victims of torture, helping them recover from the trauma and become advocates for justice and truth, is one pivotal way to change views on torture in everyone’s minds.

“A few prosecutions of people in powerful positions might concentrate the minds of the next generation,” Ian adds.

Click the links in the text to some of Ian’s articles. For more information on Ian and his work click the link here or follow Ian on Twitter (@IanCobain).

The disappeared: shedding light on a secret crime

Mother of Plaza de Mayo, Argentina, began marching in 1977 to find out what happened to their children and grandchildren during the regime. Photo by lazy tired, available on Flickr through Creative Commons

”Enforced disappearances are becoming a major human rights concern in Asia,” read the news radio announcer. “Estimated tens of thousands have been disappeared.”

The structure of that last sentenced grated on the inner copy-editor in me. “…Have been disappeared,” is markedly passive. “By whom?” I want to ask, but the uncertainty of the subject is part of the nature of enforced disappearances. The answer is: we don’t often know.

If someone is enforced, or involuntarily, disappeared, they are just that – they are gone, but no one knows to where. It is likely that they have been killed, but no one knows when or where they are buried. It is possible that they have been tortured, but no one knows if they are OK.

In countries around the world, state officials, such as police, military or other security officials, arrest and detain individuals without their families’ knowledge of their whereabouts or well-being. They are outside of the arms of the law, often tortured, often killed, and rarely found again. They simply disappear, and their families are always left to wonder what happened to their loved one.

Installation with photos of the disappeared on the day of the anniversary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Photo by Catherine Binet, available via Flickr through Creative Commons License of Advocacy Project

According to a 2012 report from the Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances, 53,778 cases have been reported since 1980. Over 42,000 of these cases, in 82 states, remain unsolved. When a person is secretly abducted, detained or killed by a state agent, this constitutes the human rights violation of enforced disappearance. Like torture, The victims are often tortured while secretly detained.

Such practices were common during the dictatorships in Latin America around the 1970s and 1980s. In Argentina, an estimated 30,000 disappeared, and only recently, with the help of forensic NGOs, have families received the remains of those missing for more than three decades.

Enforced disappearances — like torture — happen in secrecy, between four walls. As Manfred Nowak, former UN Special Rapporteur on Torture, wrote in the 2012 Global Reading, “Prison walls have a double function: to lock people in and the public out.” Not only are family members kept from the knowledge of their loved ones whereabouts, but justice cannot find the disappeared. Not seeing and not knowing means there is little recourse for justice and impunity remains.

With no record of the disappeared, how can you label the crime? Was the person tortured? Were they killed? Who is responsible? Without evidence, it is difficult to find and prosecute the perpetrators of these crimes. In countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, Pakistan, Morocco, Thailand, China, and the US, few have been held to account for the thousands of victims of enforced disappearance.

Bringing these crimes to light and ensuring the public remains aware when someone is disappeared is our role, but everyone can help. Our voice is one of the strongest weapons against these crimes and a strong challenge to the reign of impunity.

By Tessa, Communications Officer at IRCT

Zero Dark Thirty is fiction; the reality is worse

US-based Witness Against Torture and others protest against the nomination of John Brennan to head the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Brennan has outspokenly condoned the use of rendition and torture. Photo by Justin Norman, available on Flickr through Creative Commons License.

When the film “Zero Dark Thirty” started appearing dozens of times on our newsfeed each morning, at first I thought I wouldn’t have to address it. After all, we have written more than a handful of blogs on the U.S. torture programme, how torture in interrogations has been proven to be completely ineffective, and regardless is irrefutably illegal, amoral, offensive and prohibited under international law and under all circumstances.

But alas it seems I will have to repeat myself.

The problem with “Zero Dark Thirty” is not that it depicts torture. A film demonstrating the truly horrific act of torture, and what it does to people, the graphic cruelty, is not without worth. The problem with this film is that it presents itself as a realistic account of the search for Osama bin Laden, and that during this hunt, information obtained through torture was instrumental in finding him.

There-in lays the most devious lie. The CIA has repeated again that torture was not useful in obtaining the intelligence information that led to Bin Laden. Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and Armed Services Committee Chair Carl Levin also denied this was the case. But there it is in celluloid. Such a depiction simply bolsters the arguments of those who defend the efficacy of the US’s torture programme and the use of torture more generally as an effective measure to extract information and keep people ‘safe from terrorism’, a scenario that has been roundly debunked.

As Glenn Greenwald writes in The Guardian: “it propagandizes the public to favorably view clear war crimes by the US government, based on pure falsehoods.”

The debate over the film, however, is so off-kilter that even in engaging in these arguments, I find myself repeating the same framing of this debate that I find deplorable in the first place.

So let’s rephrase. It doesn’t matter if torture is effective or not. It’s not effective, as numerous parties have stated. But that’s not the point. It’s immoral, inhuman, illegal, and counter to any modern notion of human rights and international law. Torture is prohibited. Period.

Of course, as we now know, the U.S. has tortured anyways, with impunity.

In spite of its extremely problematic depictions, “Zero Dark Thirty” is a film. And while I do understand that films become part of a national discourse – or, in the words of Karen Greenberg, “[Zero Dark Thirty] will unfortunately substitute for actual history in the minds of many Americans” – the furor raised by this film should rather be directed at more dubious political decisions of the last few weeks with regard to torture – decisions that may have real, palpable consequences for the continued use of torture and the continued impunity for those who carried out or supported that programme.

Just earlier this month, John Brennan, former director of CIA’s National Counterterrorism Center until fall 2005, was nominated to head the intelligence agency, a move that critics say is highly indicative to the ways in which the crimes of the Bush administration have been institutionalised during Obama’s first term (see also, the National Defense Authorization Act in institutionalising indefinite detention). Brennan was removed from the shortlist of nominees in 2008, largely because he was considered ‘too controversial’ a figure; he has been vocally supportive of some of the worst human rights crimes of the Bush administration, including rendition and torture.

Consider a 2005 interview he gave soon after leaving the CIA. Asked about rendition and why some terrorism suspects are sent to other countries, Brennan responded:

“Well, sometimes that is the case because there could be an outstanding warrant for someone’s arrest in another country or they need to go back to the country of their origin because the local government and service can in fact question them more effectively in that country than in the place where they had been captured.”

His opinion on rendition?

“And I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.”

What we now know is that his useless euphemisms on ‘effective interrogation’ really meant being tortured in other countries, whether it was Egypt, Libya, Syria, Afghanistan, or other CIA ‘black sites’. Many of the countries where detainees were sent were cited by the US’s own State Department for human rights violations and torture – a clear violation of the UN Convention Against Torture, which prohibits countries from sending individuals to a country where there is a clear risk of torture. Just last month, the European Court of Human Rights deemed the treatment of one such detainee, Khaled El-Masri, a German citizen who was mistaken for another person, to be illegal. El-Masri was detained in Macedonia, handed over to CIA officials, who then sent him on an illegal rendition flight to an Afghanistan ‘black site’, where was secretly held and tortured for four months.

But a large point to consider is that we don’t even know the extent of Brennan’s involvement in the torture and rendition programme. US involvement in torture, its extent, and who is responsible remains shadowy and beset by piece-meal information.

The US Senate Intelligence Committee approved last month a 6,000 page ‘torture report’ on the CIA’s detention and interrogation policies. But it has not been made public. It currently remains classified, and considering the Obama administration’s ‘reluctance’ (to put it kindly) to address the crimes of the previous administration and hold anyone accountable, well, I’m not holding my breath.

The furor over ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is not without merit and cause. But it could also be directed to more pressing crimes – the continued impunity and, in Brennan’s case, the institutionalising of these crimes. Instead of boycotting the film’s director Kathryn Bigelow or protesting outside of cinemas, we should hold our policy-makers to account, bring out the full truth on these heinous crimes depicted in the film and ensure that those defending such crimes don’t end up in leadership positions again.

Tessa is a Communications Officer at the IRCT.

Impunity continues in US

US Attorney General Eric Holder announced Thursday that the Justice Department has decided not to pursue criminal charges following their investigation of the CIA torture programme. Photo by USDAgov, available at Flickr through Creative Commons License.

US Justice Department closes investigation of CIA torture programme with no criminal charges

No one has been charged for any crimes committed during the Bush Administration’s CIA torture programme. US Department of Justice Attorney General Eric Holder announced yesterday that the department had concluded its investigation and found that, “the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

So, yet again, crimes that took place during the Bush era will be pushed aside. Whatever the reasons given for this decision, the reality remains that crimes occurred – torture, rendition, abuse of detainees – in clear violation of well-established international law [PDF]. The ongoing impunity for these abuses and the lack of justice for the victims shows that the U.S. continues to flout the rule of law.

The investigation, broadly speaking, focused on three main areas: detainees allegedly held by the CIA abroad, the destruction of CIA videotaped interrogations, and two deaths in detention. The latter two portions of the investigation had previously been dropped, and the final announcement yesterday pertained only to the deaths of Gul Rahman and Manadel al-Jamadi.

Rahman, a suspected Afghan militant, was taken to a CIA-operated prison near Kabul, called the Salt Pit. Left inside a cold cell and half-naked, Rahman was found dead in the early morning of 20 November 2002. According to the Associated Press, a CIA doctor ruled the cause of his death as hypothermia. His body was never returned to his relatives.

Manadel al-Jamadi was among those detained and interrogated at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He died within five hours of his arrest, and military investigators ruled his death a homicide caused by, “blunt force trauma to the torso complicated by compromised respiration.”

The families of neither of these men will see justice any time soon. No one has been found guilty; no was has had to face criminal charges for their deaths. Impunity continues to reign in the U.S.

Use of evidence obtained through torture perpetuates the problem

Canada’s national police directives clearly violate international law, which dictates that countries must not use information or evidence obtained through torture

Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews.

We have said it before; and we shall say it again.

Countries must not use evidence or information obtained through torture. In any circumstances. Doing so is a clear violation of international law, especially those countries who have signed onto the obligations within the UN Convention Against Torture. The Convention, which Canada ratified in 1985, states:

Article 15

Each State Party shall ensure that any statement which is established to have been made as a result of torture shall not be invoked as evidence in any proceedings, except against a person accused of torture as evidence that the statement was made.

Yet, Canada’s Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has issued directives to both the Canadian Border Services Agency and the national police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), saying that they have the authority to use and share data and evidence that was likely obtained through torture.

Toews apparently has a short memory. Just six years ago, a federal commission recommended that Canada never share information with other countries if it is likely that it will cause or contribute to torture. This recommendation followed an investigation into the case of Canadian engineer Maher Arar, who was detained in the U.S. after RCMP provided faulty information to the US authorities. Arar was rendered to his native Syria, where he was tortured and detained for about a year.

Arar’s case was among those mentioned in the hefty criticisms leveled against the Canadian government during this year’s review by the UN Committee against Torture. The Committee condemned Canadian ‘complicity’ in torture.

Canada joins others such as Denmark in the shameful club of countries that justify their use of information obtained through torture by clinging to the long-dismissed arguments of ‘ticking-time bombs’ and public safety.

So, let’s again make this clear. The ticking-time bomb scenario doesn’t happen [PDF]. It’s clearly been proven false. Torture does not work [PDF].

And using information obtained through torture simply allows it to continue unabated.

To get to the truth, there needs to be reform

If you have been following the sprawling UK inquiry into detainees rendered during the so-called ‘war on terror’, you may have noticed the announcement this Friday that Abdul Hakim Belhadj, a former Libyan rebel leader who just last month announced he would take legal action against the UK government for his alleged torture, would not take part in the inquiry.

He says the inquiry lacks sufficient powers  “to get to the truth of Britain’s involvement” in abuses. We agree.

The IRCT has joined other human rights organisations, two former UN special rapporteurs on torture, and other international experts in calling for reform of the UK ‘Detainee Inquiry’:

We contend that fundamental problems plague the inquiry, thus, leaving it open for a lack of credibility.
“Without substantial changes, it will not get to the truth of Britain’s involvement or ensure such abuses do not occur again,” the letter states.

Read our entire statement here, and the open letter to UK Prime Minister Cameron here (PDF).

IRCT supports prosecution and investigation of Bush for torture

The IRCT supports the private prosecution of former U.S. President George W. Bush for the torture of four individuals by U.S. officials during their detention in Guantánamo. We, along with the other signatories of this letter, seek a criminal investigation and prosecution of Mr. Bush upon his arrival in Canada for violations against the Canadian criminal code and the UN Convention against Torture, of which Canada has ratified.

Read our full statement and the letter (PDF) we signed in conjunction with about 50 other non-governmental organisations.