Posted by David Kopel:
What Guantanamo is Really Like:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2005_06_19-2005_06_25.shtml#1119201773
Senator Richard Durbin has been justly mocked for his statement about
what an FBI reported seeing at Guantanamo:
"If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI
agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their
control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done
by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime -- Pol Pot or
others -- that had no concern for human beings."
The more plausible analogy to Guantanamo is British interrogation of
Irish Republican Army suspects in the early 1970s. Then, the British
extracted confressions through "the five techniques": wall-standing,
hooding, continuous noise, deprivation of food, and deprivation of
sleep. The European Court of Human Rights, in the 1978 case
[1]Republic of Ireland v. United Kingdom, ruled that the techniques
did not constitute "torture," but were "inhuman and degrading," in
violation of Article 3 of the [2]European Convention on Human Rights.
The European convention obviously does not apply to the American
interrogation of Arab or Afghan terrorist suspects at a military base
in Cuba, but there are still plausible objections that can be raised
against coerceive interrogations, even when the persons being
interrogated are terrorists. Serious discussion about Guanatamo would
be enhanced by looking to appropriate historical analogies (such as
the U.K.'s self-defense in the 1970s against the I.R.A.), rather than
to absurd analogies, such as those drawn by Senator Durbin, which
trivialize the Holocaust, the Soviet genocide, and the Pol Pot
genocide.
References
1. http://www.lawofwar.org/Ireland_v_United_Kingdom.htm
2. http://www.hri.org/docs/ECHR50.html#C.Art3
_______________________________________________
Volokh mailing list
[email protected]
http://highsorcery.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/volokh
