Awhile back, I wrote a post for The Moderate Voice about the torture debate in this country. A few days after putting the piece up, I noticed a comment by a man who went by the pseudonym “mondliath.” He had written the response after much of the discussion had died down, so I doubt that many people had a chance to read it. A Western expatriate, mondliath testified to having been subjected to torture when living in Saudi Arabia back in 2000. The detached, yet highly detailed, manner in which he relates these events suggests that it is no fabrication.* His story and the subsequent analysis, which I will post below, are both fascinating and disturbing:
…I have rather too much personal experience having had to endure both basic “coercive interrogation†and other more brutal methods of torture. In December 2000 a series of car bombings that killed and injured a number of westerners began to occur in Saudi Arabia. I and 7 other western expatriate workers were arrested and forced to confess to the said crimes in order to allow the Saudi’s to deny that they had a home grown terrorist problem. I was put through periods of sleep deprivation (forced to stand by being chained upright to the cell door) the longest periods of which were 11, 14 and 20 days, stress positioning during interrogation, beatings across the back, legs, hands, soles of the feet and scrotum, suspended off the ground in the chicken position (tied around a metal bar) and beaten in the aforementioned places, suspended off the ground in a position called the swing (hung upside down on a cable) and beaten in the aforementioned places. I first confessed (or told my interrogators what they wanted to hear) after 6 days, which brought a temporary respite, and then through subsequent periods of torture added refinements to the story they wanted me to tell. I was eventually released after 964 days in captivity, all of which were spent in solitary confinement.
One would be right to ask why I confessed if I was innocent? Simply to gain the brief respite that I received for my initial confession. There was only so much I could endure, even when by confessing I was essentially giving my captors the authority to execute me for capital crimes, so death had become preferable to the agony. Yet, even I, a middle aged man with no training or preparation, managed to hold out for 6 days before telling my captors what they wanted to hear. Admittedly, the Saudi’s were out to extract a confession that they knew not to be the truth, so whatever I told them as long as it was within their required framework was what they were after. The truth had nothing to do with it. My fellow detainees all suffered varying degrees of torture, and all began to provide false confessions within 4 to 9 days of having been arrested.
Even in situations where the arresting authority is chasing after the truth, the subject of the torture is likely at some point to start telling them what they want to hear (or what the subject thinks the interrogators want to hear). Referring to the case of the Tipton Three, British Muslims of Pakistani ethnic origin, Asif Iqbal, Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul were arrested in Afghanistan and ended up in Guantanamo. False confessions produced via a rewards system allied with the other techniques of coercive interrogation, had these 3 men branded as hard core Al Qaeda members.
Eventually it was claimed that they were present in a video of a meeting in August 2000 between Usama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers. However the men in the video looked nothing like them. Furthermore, in August 2000, when the video was shot, Rasul had been working in a branch of the electronics store Curry’s, and was enrolled at the University of Central England. Yet after the months of isolation and serial interrogation in stress positions Rasul gave up and confessed that it was him in the video. The other two made similar confessions.
In September 2003, MI5 arrived at the camp with the documentary evidence which showed they could not have been in Afghanistan at the relevant time, confirming their alibis and providing further proof that none of the three had any association with radical Islamists. Finally, they were released in March 2004. Still the three men had provided false confessions as psychologically they had reached a breaking point caused by the very nature of the interrogation techniques. Their interrogators were in no doubt after the truth, and the detainees were innocent of the charges, yet between the parties involved all that was gained were false confessions, bad intelligence and 3 men held for 26 months.
An older story, but one just as horrific, concerns the cases of the Guilford 4, the MacGuire 7 and the Birmingham 6 in Britain during the mid-1970’s when an IRA bombing campaign was in operation The details of these cases fill volumes, but it is essentially a situation in which coercive techniques and beatings were illegally used by police officers producing a series of false confessions that led to convictions (in at least one of the cases the added complication of now discredited forensic evidence that had the authorities unwilling to consider the true nature of the confessions). As a result the individuals concerned were given sentences ranging from 12 years to life imprisonment for being involved in the IRA bombing campaign on mainland Britain during 1974-1975. Eventually, the convictions were overturned, but not until some of the individuals had served out their sentences, whilst others had served up to sixteen years (one detainee Giuseppe Conlon died in prison). The real perpetrators remained at large, though it seems that some were arrested for other terrorist incidents, but never investigated for those relating to the above cases.
These miscarriages of justice were not only effectively crimes against the wrongly convicted, but also a disservice to the very government and judiciary that imposed the sentences. Both British security service officers and leading members of the IRA have stated in recent years that the convictions and the use of coercive interrogation techniques and brutality to gain the confessions assisted the IRA in gaining recruits and increased the support for the organisation both in Ulster and the Republic. The same effect is now being seen in the upsurge of anti-American sentiment and support of Al Qaeda in various Muslim nations derived from the torture that has occurred at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo (regardless of the fact that under the Taliban rule in Afghanistan and Saddam’s rule in Iraq even worse levels of torture were a regular means of subduing the population).
From my own research in the nearly 4 years since my release, I have come across extremely few situations where torture or coercive interrogation was shown to be an effective means of intelligence gathering even in the long term, and have found no cases where it is been effective at all in the short time frames posited in the ticking bomb hypothesis. However, within popular mythology, as espoused in much of entertainment media (e.g. 24, Nikita etc.), it bears instant results, fuelling our own need for a quick fix to the problems of terrorism that invoke in us real fears. In fact, the only result that torture seems provide is a propaganda victory for the other side, hardly something one wants hand to one’s enemy.
This is only part of what he wrote; mondliath’s full commentary is here — just scroll down the page.
*(Please note that, while this story is compelling, I have no way of confirming it.)