Greg Sheridan on torture

By contrast, a real-life justification must justify a wide range of common garden cases, beginning with the torture of innocent people and hapless suspects in the hope of finding information which might be useful to national security interests.

This is the formulation required if we wish to justify the systematic abuse and enhanced interrogation of Guantanamo detainees, mostly soldiers who fought to defend the Taliban regime against a US-led invasion. What 'enhanced' means is detailed in a Nov. 2008 report by the US Senate Committee on Armed Services; it means the use of methods

based, in part, on Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean war to elicit false confessions, including stripping … of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, disrupting their sleep, treating them like animals, subjecting them to loud music and flashing lights, and exposing them to extreme temperatures. It can also include face and body slaps and until recently, for some who attended the Navy's SERE school, it included waterboarding.

Former CIA torturer Glenn Carle, a fellow panelist on the same show, explained why:

fundamentally they are designed to … psychologically dislocate the detainee…. you make the person half crazy…. you have sound at an almost deafening level nonstop and the sounds are designed to create stress…. you hear silence and the silence is deafening and frightening because there's been nonstop sound and then you don't let someone sleep for 17 hours and you let them sleep for 8 minutes and you tell them it was 8 hours and you completely mess them up and it's very quick.

US military intelligence added a further refinement after Guantanam0 director Major General Geoffrey Miller visited Abu Ghraib in the summer of 2003. The new methods were designed to inflict a profound sense of religious shame, using forced masturbation, naked human pyramids and fake menstrual blood. This alternated with the use of vicious attack dogs to intimidate prisoners during interrogation.

We now know from the authoritative Denbeaux Study on Guantanamo by US Law Professor Mark Denbeaux of Seton Hall Law School, based on US Government files obtained under freedom of information laws, that ordinary Afghan citizens were detained as terrorists if found to be wearing olive drab clothing or a Casio watch. We know that 92% had never fought for al Quaeda and that only 5% were captured by US troops - the rest having been purchased from Pakistani and Northern Alliance forces for amounts up to US$5000. Given the Alliance had just lost a savage civil war against the Taliban, and the high local value of US currency, its motives and claims were always dubious.

So much so that after nine years, of the more than 770 detainees in Guantanamo, only a handful were tried and convicted; over 700 were quietly repatriated without charge - but also without apology and without compensation, most after years of imprisonment and 'harsh techniques' of interrogation.

This is what the abuse of rights and torture means in real-life cases not fascinating puzzles for philosophers; it helps explain Sheridan's equivocation when asked to clarify what he had in mind. This admirer of George Eliot and Henry James could not say what kind of torture he would use or when he would use it. It is the same evasiveness - to the point of dissembling - displayed by John Yoo, co-author of the infamous 'torture memos', before an outraged US House Judiciary Committee in June, 2008.

If we now ask what this has to do with the general debate on torture, the answer is reasonably obvious. If the Guantanamo cases are, in Sheridan's words, 'extreme', it means there are no meaningful constraints on the use of torture as a tool of foreign policy; but if they exceed the scope of legitimate torture he has a clear duty to say so.

But if he speaks his mind he will lose the access to US power he commanded as an influential supporter of US policies during the Iraq War when, in April 2004, he enjoyed a private interview with Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of Defence, who he saw as 'chief intellectual architect of the Iraq invasion and high priest of the neo-conservatives'. This is important to any writer on US defence policies and to the proprietor of a national broadsheet which strongly supports them - if he is not welcome in Washington he will quickly be replaced as Australia's most influential foreign affairs analyst.

All moral and political argument relies on the difference between exceptions and inconsistencies. When someone puts a controversial claim that torture should be used in certain cases, they have a responsibility to do so with articulate consistency. When Tony Jones - within the limits of the show's format - sought this, Sheridan did not know what to say. It was clear he could not reconcile his special cases with his claim that torture is wrong, and the more he tried to do so the less articulate he became.

The incoherence goes deeper; justification presupposes a personal commitment, and commitment to a moral position is as much an affair of the heart as the mind. We test our judgments against our moral intuition and confirm this intuition by reason. We often rely, as elsewhere in the social sciences, on a method some philosophers have described as a process of 'reflective equilibrium', seen in the idea that we learn about ourselves by studying others, and about others by studying ourselves.

Is it unreasonable to conclude that this experienced journalist could not, as a civilized human being, bring himself to do what the US has been doing for years, but was simply unwilling to criticise it in public?