We all have heard the legal spiel the Bush Administration as to how they could get away with such acts by doing two things: firstly, they redefined ‘Torture’. By narrowing the definition to exclude all their newly listed interrogation acts they could claim that most acts were outside of such definition; thus ‘America does not torture’. Secondly, they claimed that due to the fact Al Qaeda was not a state they were at war with, suspects of Al Qaeda were exempt from the protection of the Geneva conventions.

The legal definition of torture as given became “intense pain equal to that of organ failure”. It is unclear how the US could persuasively argue that the use of techniques such as waterboarding, which recreate the feelings of suffocation, is not equal to such pain.

The idea of suspects of Al Qaeda not belonging to a state is flawed in logic in itself. Firstly whilst the collective Al Qaeda may not arguably be geographically rooted in one state, individually the people are so. As the Geneva Conventions is a standard set for prisoners of war, it is illogical to say that they are not prisoners of the ‘War against Terror’. Al Qaeda is just another label given to a human being and there is no reason why it should eclipse all over labels. It would be illogical to say that a terrorist suspect is either a terrorist or a male, that they cannot be both. So why can they not be a suspected terrorist and a human being with rights, a father or a son? Finally what about the hundreds of innocent terror suspects that have been released without charge? They surely would have just been innocent political prisoners belonging most likely to some state or another. The US cannot justify exempting them from the Geneva Conventions and ignoring several articles laid out in the Universal Declaration.

What is more unsettling is that there is evidence that torture does not work. To justify such acts on the consequentialist view of the ticking time bomb scenario of torturing one to save thousands is for the ignorant. There is never going to be a situation laid out like the one laid out in that hypothesis, it is therefore equivalent of justifying the murdering of all Muslim children in the chance that one of them may become a suspected terrorist. Further there is evidence that torture is spreading hatred and potential future risks. A terror suspect may not have had any interest in harming anyone in the US or UK, however put them in Abu Ghraib for five years torturing them to the point where they will never recover and most likely their feelings towards our great nations may change.

These actions do not make sense when we look at the progress that we in the west have come in setting a human rights standard that the rest of the world should follow, to then contradict every value that we previously held. The relative silence of the western citizens in light of this shows an indifference or acceptance. Perhaps Historians will look back at the crimes of the west from the Nazi’s to the war we are currently in as one long bloody period, with a quiet 50 year break where some optimists tried and failed to establish change.