Torture works, said American President Donald Trump when he announced he would bring back the water boarding and secret prisons that had been abolished under his predecessor Barack Obama.
Torture is in direct violation of the human rights that most of the world’s leaders, representatives and civilians agree to – even if that is not the case for some countries in the Middle East.
But to openly support it, as the leader of one of the most powerful countries of the world did, really sends a wrong signal to those using torture but are hiding and denying it exactly because most of the world does not accept it.
There is another even more important reason why Trump’s policy is wrong, and that is the fact that torture does not even work.
We know this in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein used it to get the confessions he wanted. I remember the prison in Basra I visited days after the liberation in 2003, where the electric wires were still ready for use in the bathrooms.
As far as I know, there are only two possibilities when torturing: the victims confess whatever they are told to under duress, or they keep their mouth shut anyway.
Saddam would use psychological torture to change the minds of the latter group, bringing family members into the torture room and threatening to rape or abuse them.
Yet I still maintain that torture does not work, as is also become apparent from a recent report by the human rights organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The organization says that 17 children, aged between 11 and 17, who have been held since July 2016 by the Kurdistan Regional Government, have been tortured and abused in detention. They are some of the at least 183 boys held mostly without charge or access to a lawyer, accused of involvement with ISIS.
They were all Sunni Arabs from Nineveh, Salahaddin, or Kirkuk areas that were occupied by ISIS until recently, and mostly taken into custody after screening in Debaga camp for internally displaced people.
They told HRW that the Kurdish security police, the Asayesh, “held them in stress positions, burned them with cigarettes, punched and kicked them, beat them with plastic pipes and cables, and shocked them with electricity,” as the report states.
HRW reports that “nearly all the children who alleged that Asayish members tortured them said that they ultimately made and fingerprinted confessions to stop the torture.”
“Some said they freely admitted that they had worked with ISIS or received religious or weapons training from them, but they said the interrogators continued to press them to falsely confess to greater involvement, such as participation in battles or killing KRG Peshmerga forces.”
Not only should no-one be submitted to this kind of treatment, but moreover, the comments of the kids involved show that confessions given under this kind of duress are simply not to be trusted.
They admitted guilt simply not to be hurt anymore as many others who were submitted to torture have done too. This means that people who are convicted and jailed based on a confession made under torture could very well be innocent.
Unless the only thing that counts is to have confessions, no matter whether they are true or false, torture is a bad method of interrogation, as we have also seen in the American prisons in Iraq after 2003.
Many of the Sunnis who were interrogated there, abused, humiliated, victims of water boarding and sleep deprivation, turned against the Americans, even if they did not join organisations like Al Qaida.
I witnessed the negative outcome of this kind of treatment myself, when the son of Arab friends living in Erbil was picked up, after his neighbours told the authorities he was a dangerous radical Muslim. The neighbours wanted to get the house the family was living in for a low price, as they eventually did, thanks to what happened next.
It took us months to get this innocent boy out of the centre where the security police was interrogating him, using shocks, as he later admitted, which led him to confessing to something he did not do. Once he was freed, his parents sold the house far below its value and moved back to Baghdad. The boy is still showing the results of the duress he was under: he is nervous, unstable, has no friends, quit school and now is indeed becoming increasingly religious.
Even though many of these stories are known, the president of the United States seems to think he knows better and propagates openly that torture works.
Mister president, unless you do not care that innocent people are being convicted, that human lives are destroyed and that victims are turned against the power that has humiliated and abused them, you really cannot be in favor of torture.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
Torture is in direct violation of the human rights that most of the world’s leaders, representatives and civilians agree to – even if that is not the case for some countries in the Middle East.
But to openly support it, as the leader of one of the most powerful countries of the world did, really sends a wrong signal to those using torture but are hiding and denying it exactly because most of the world does not accept it.
There is another even more important reason why Trump’s policy is wrong, and that is the fact that torture does not even work.
We know this in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein used it to get the confessions he wanted. I remember the prison in Basra I visited days after the liberation in 2003, where the electric wires were still ready for use in the bathrooms.
As far as I know, there are only two possibilities when torturing: the victims confess whatever they are told to under duress, or they keep their mouth shut anyway.
Saddam would use psychological torture to change the minds of the latter group, bringing family members into the torture room and threatening to rape or abuse them.
Yet I still maintain that torture does not work, as is also become apparent from a recent report by the human rights organisation Human Rights Watch (HRW).
The organization says that 17 children, aged between 11 and 17, who have been held since July 2016 by the Kurdistan Regional Government, have been tortured and abused in detention. They are some of the at least 183 boys held mostly without charge or access to a lawyer, accused of involvement with ISIS.
They were all Sunni Arabs from Nineveh, Salahaddin, or Kirkuk areas that were occupied by ISIS until recently, and mostly taken into custody after screening in Debaga camp for internally displaced people.
They told HRW that the Kurdish security police, the Asayesh, “held them in stress positions, burned them with cigarettes, punched and kicked them, beat them with plastic pipes and cables, and shocked them with electricity,” as the report states.
HRW reports that “nearly all the children who alleged that Asayish members tortured them said that they ultimately made and fingerprinted confessions to stop the torture.”
“Some said they freely admitted that they had worked with ISIS or received religious or weapons training from them, but they said the interrogators continued to press them to falsely confess to greater involvement, such as participation in battles or killing KRG Peshmerga forces.”
Not only should no-one be submitted to this kind of treatment, but moreover, the comments of the kids involved show that confessions given under this kind of duress are simply not to be trusted.
They admitted guilt simply not to be hurt anymore as many others who were submitted to torture have done too. This means that people who are convicted and jailed based on a confession made under torture could very well be innocent.
Unless the only thing that counts is to have confessions, no matter whether they are true or false, torture is a bad method of interrogation, as we have also seen in the American prisons in Iraq after 2003.
Many of the Sunnis who were interrogated there, abused, humiliated, victims of water boarding and sleep deprivation, turned against the Americans, even if they did not join organisations like Al Qaida.
I witnessed the negative outcome of this kind of treatment myself, when the son of Arab friends living in Erbil was picked up, after his neighbours told the authorities he was a dangerous radical Muslim. The neighbours wanted to get the house the family was living in for a low price, as they eventually did, thanks to what happened next.
It took us months to get this innocent boy out of the centre where the security police was interrogating him, using shocks, as he later admitted, which led him to confessing to something he did not do. Once he was freed, his parents sold the house far below its value and moved back to Baghdad. The boy is still showing the results of the duress he was under: he is nervous, unstable, has no friends, quit school and now is indeed becoming increasingly religious.
Even though many of these stories are known, the president of the United States seems to think he knows better and propagates openly that torture works.
Mister president, unless you do not care that innocent people are being convicted, that human lives are destroyed and that victims are turned against the power that has humiliated and abused them, you really cannot be in favor of torture.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.
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