Tortured Intelligence

Physical abuse of terrorist suspects is always wrong and yields dubious information. But to disregard on principle the intelligence yielded might cost lives

From The Times, August 11, 2009

Torture is wrong. The deliberate infliction of pain is a repugnant practice that produces deeply suspect information. David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, and Alan Johnson, the Home Secretary, have denied that British intelligence agents use torture or collude in its use by other states. That is the only reputable position for any British government. But it prompts the additional question whether Britain’s security services should even consider intelligence gained from the use of torture by other states. Moralising gets the discussion only so far. There are malign people overseas who do not have Britain’s interests at heart. And while the security services ought heavily to discount information gained from torture, they have to consider it nonetheless.

Physical pressure in interrogations was last an issue in British politics during the peak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The security services used harsh methods of sensory deprivation against prisoners. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Britain was guilty of inhuman and degrading treatment of the internees, though not of inflicting suffering so cruel that it met the definition of physical torture.

Britain’s security services are now in a quandary: they accept more exacting standards while contending with a still more ferocious terrorist enemy. The methods of today’s terrorists, who plant bombs in trains and bars, are familiar from the Provisional IRA’s campaigns. But the millen- arian aims of these Islamist terrorists are new. And because the activities of al-Qaeda and similar groups are international, other states are involved in trying to interdict them. The security services of those states may not be scrupulous in adhering to the rule of law.

The physical abuse of terrorist suspects is a brute fact of international politics, about which this country can do little. The question then arises what use should be made of information gained on foreign soil.

The immediate response of any civilised person to torture is revulsion at the practice and determination to have no part in inflicting it. That must be the policy of this country. Britain’s security services must not use torture and must not tacitly contract out such interrogation techniques to other parties. The campaign against Islamist terrorism will last for decades, even on the most hopeful assumptions. If a civilised state allows temporary departures from its norms, these are likely to become persistent.

The Government should also acknowledge publicly that information gained this way by other states will be treated sceptically. A prisoner who suffers torture is liable to say anything and implicate anyone if it will spare him further pain. There must always be a presumption that intelligence gained from such methods is of low value. Exposing the use of torture by nominally allied though autocratic states would also put pressure on its perpetrators.

But it would be incredible to say that torture cannot ever yield valuable information. To treat intelligence sceptically does not mean you must disregard it completely. Jamal Beghal, a suspected al-Qaeda terrorist, provides an instructive example. He was detained in Dubai in October 2001, and subjected to beatings over weeks. He eventually gave information that prevented an attack on the US Embassy in Paris.

That intelligence was appallingly won; it saved lives nonetheless. A civilised state must abjure torture and explain why information gained that way is heavily qualified. But a democracy must work with all available intelligence. Refusing to do so offers the comfort of moral certainty at the expense of public safety. It is the type of stance described by Reinhold Niebuhr, the great Protestant ethicist, as “perfectionism without pity”.