Torture doesn’t work — and in Iraq, its consequences were disastrous

Reprieve
Reprieve
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read

Bella Sankey, Reprieve Deputy Director

Last week we learned that both Donald Trump and Sir John Chilcot have little faith in the intelligence that took us into Iraq.

Sir John suggested to the BBC, in an interview broadcast today, that it was not “wise” of Tony Blair, the former UK Prime Minister, to have relied on the intelligence assessments with which he was presented in the run-up to the 2003 invasion. President Trump, meanwhile, told a typically surreal press conference in Poland that US intelligence agencies had made serious mistakes in the past. “Everybody was 100% sure that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction” in 2003, he said — adding: “Guess what? That led to one big mess.”

This time at least, the President is not wrong. Trump has made no secret of the fact that he thinks the Iraq war was a huge mistake — and Sir John agrees, in his diplomatic way.

However, both men have failed to join the dots between the faulty intelligence leading to the war — and the catastrophic tactics used to obtain it.

The ‘evidence’ concocted before the war was faulty, because it was partly extracted by force from detainees — hundreds of whom who were swept up and detained without trial by US forces in the weeks and months after 9/11. One of these men, Ibn Sheikh al Libi, was first held in the notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan. At the US-run facility, beatings, sexual assault, and threats to rape family members were the norm. UK intelligence officers were involved in his ordeal, coming regularly to interrogate him.

After some weeks, CIA officers spirited Mr al Libi away to Egypt. There, he was locked in a cramped box for 17-hour stints, subjected to a ‘mock burial’, and repeatedly beaten. It was in Egypt that he told his captors what they wanted to hear. Desperate for the torture to stop, he made up a story that Saddam Hussein was in league with al-Qaeda, and had been training them in the use of chemical weapons.

Bingo, thought the Bush Administration. Then-President Bush, and then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, used these forced statements as a central plank of the case for war in Iraq. As we know, disaster followed.

It was not only in relation to Iraq that terrible mistakes were made at the height of the so-called ‘War on Terror’. UK officials played a central role in the worst abuses, such as the rendition of Libyan dissidents and their families to Gaddafi’s torture chambers, or the handing over of detainees to the US in the knowledge they would be tortured.


What have we learned since then? Very little, it seems. Trump’s wants to bring back waterboarding, ‘and a hell of a lot worse’. Shamefully, the UK Government still refuses to account for its role in these abuses.

Seven years ago, then-Prime Minister David Cameron promised a public inquiry, led by a judge, into the UK’s role in War-on-Terror era torture. It has yet to materialise.

Worse still, the Government refuses to apologise to the victims of past abuses, or to meet them in open British courts.

Abdul Hakim Belhaj

Last week, the UK’s top prosecutor told the Lord Chief Justice that she won’t disclose the reasons why she is refusing to prosecute UK officials involved in the case of Abdul Hakim Belhaj. Mr Belhaj, a Libyan dissident, was abducted in a 2004 joint CIA-MI6 operation with his then-pregnant wife Fatima, and rendered to Gaddafi’s prison. The couple tell their lawyers at Reprieve that they just want an apology.

To be clear, torture doesn’t work — and its consequences are disastrous. The use of torture to concoct ‘evidence’ in the run-up to Iraq was a catastrophic error. But unless the UK Government acknowledges and accounts for its historic mistakes, we — and our allies — are doomed to repeat them.

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Reprieve delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantánamo Bay.

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