Guantanamo mirrors the US prison system
A seminar in central London for law students from 10 countries across the world, including Britain and the United States, will discuss the issue of torture within the context of domestic law.
The lecture will be jointly delivered by Professor James Forman, professor of law at Georgetown university, Washington DC, and Helena Kennedy QC (currently representing a defendant in another “terror” trial at the secure crown court in Woolwich, south east London).
Talking to Professor Forman last night, I asked him about Barack Obama’s attitude to torture. He said people were asking the wrong questions, and that it was easy to berate the Americans over Guantanamo and the use of torture. What is much harder, he argued, is to look at both issues in the context of the domestic management of crime in America.
He told me that America currently has around 2 million people in prison – more than any nation, including China. According to the numbers put together by his faculty, a staggering 23,000 of these are in solitary confinement – not (as would be the case in the UK) as a punishment for infringing prison rules, but because it is part of their sentence.
When a human rights NGO put up a lookalike Guantanamo prison cell on the Mall in Washington, it caused no stir because, within the context of prison in America, it is not unusual. Shutting Guantanamo, according to Professor Forman, is a relative breeze compared with doing anything about the US prison system.
Like Obama, Forman is a black lawyer. He says that precisely because of his ethnicity Obama is unlikely to do anything about the way America jails people (a high proportion of them black males). As a black president, he’s not going to risk being seen as “soft” on crime.
Like Lincoln before him, Obama is already proving himself a pragmatist. Shutting Guantanamo symbolises his feelings about the “system” and the use of torture, says Forman. He suggests that where we are much more likely to see radicalism out of Obama will be on issues like climate change. Much less controversial, he has assembled the brightest and the best to tackle it.
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Torture is a really tricky issue.
Whenever the issue crops up in the news, everybody seems to be bending over backwards to say “Britain doesn’t do Torture” and be politically correct. The same old campaigners seem to be wheeled out on the telly news, every time…
Is that picture what the country at large, the man in the street, really thinks ? Or is it merely what we are supposed to think, what the people who currently run the country want everybody to say…?
Frankly, if aircraft are used to destroy skyscrapers and there’s genuine concern about what might be next, particularly things like dirty-bombs, my conscience (as an ordinary man in the street) doesn’t trouble me too much if some suspects are made to feel a little uncomfortable.
I don’t mean Gestapo like operations on the wedding vegetables or anything like that. Those sort of activities are completely inexcusable. There’s no need to cause any sort of physical injury whatsoever…
But is sleep deprivation (for example) really as bad as some people make out…?
It would obviously be quite wrong to use sleep deprivation on somebody who hasn’t paid their Council Tax. Perhaps wrong even on a suspected serial-killer/muderer, but in the exceptional case where we are fighting terror and trying to PREVENT some MAJOR ATROCITIES that would kill hundreds or thousands and there’s already been a first-strike on the World Trade Centre… ?
As I say, its a very tricky issue. My comment/observation is that I don’t think public opinion is being accurately reflected (or even researched) at the moment…
Torture is wrong full stop, there should be no compromise in this whatsoever.
Solitary confinement is torture.
My copy of the Oxford English Dictionary describes Torture as “Severe physical or mental pain”.
I suppose the key word in that definition is what constitutes “Severe”…
Where does “uncomfortable” stop and “severe” begin ?