Literature Festival Writer-in-Residence, Kalinda Ashton offers a passionate and thought-provoking review of Gareth Peirce in L048 Dispatches from the Dark Side, an event focusing on the use of torture in the war on terror and the consequent erosion of human rights.
I was intrigued to see Gareth Pierce speak about the erosion of human rights, the torture of prisoners, and undermining of rule of law that has emerged in the UK (and elsewhere) since September 11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In Australia, where I’m from, I had spent some years involved in an organisation campaigning against repressive new anti-terror laws in my home country, the passing of worryingly termed ‘anti-sedition’ legislation and the horrifying treatment of Australians David Hicks and Jack Thomas while incarcerated (Hicks in Guantanamo Bay). As in the UK and the United States, Australia saw a host of new powers introduced ostensibly to combat terrorism that removed basic and fundamental tenets of transparency and equality before the law. This involved not only the right to hold suspects without charge for extended periods of time but also the provision of severe penalties for such suspects even notifying anyone or speaking publicly about their detention. Trials held in secret were justified under the silencing claim of protecting ‘national security’ a vague but sufficiently menacing phrase to silence all but the most trenchant of critics.
And the last few years has seen not only the horrors of Abu Ghraib photos, but also “extraordinary rendition” that phrase of evasive and euphemistic genius – a weasel word term surely right up there with “collateral damage” – which saw those accused of terrorism and other crimes whisked away to black holes of the world where they could be tortured to the United States government’s, and its allies, hearts’ content without reprisal since these acts of cruelty and humiliation weren’t actually taking place on US soil and therefore could be shoddily justified or plausibly denied. How did we end up in a world where the question of whether we ought to be torturing those against whom now charges have been proven is debated in the pages of mainstream newspaper with commentators expressing their views as guilelessly as if they were discussing topics as ordinary and acceptable as changing tax regulations or health care rebates? (And that’s leaving aside the conclusion that several experts, regardless of their political affiliations, have spoken publicly about: the fact that torture, put simply, does not work, since suspects in agony are likely to admit to almost anything to make the pain stop.)
For a woman with such a polemical style and fierce criticisms, Pierce in person is remarkably gentle, softly spoken, careful and self-deprecating. (At the end of the session she whispered to the chair that she was sure no one would wish to attend her book signing and perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary). She spoke of her fear that the modern state in the United Kingdom is headed for “moral and political catastrophe”, obsessed by the construction of “suspect communities” particularly Islamic or Middle-Eastern people’s who at this moment are dubbed “extremist” in a manufactured culture of suspicion and fear. Pierce also compared some of the manipulation of evidence and treatment of suspects with the fabricated evidence and planted “proof” used against Irish resistance fighters and those she has defended against trumped up charges and corrupt police.
As a lawyer who has represented Moazzam Begg (who along with Hicks and Mamdouh Habib was held in Guantanamo Bay – a prison created under principles consciously aimed at avoiding any legal or military limitations, obligations or safeguards – tortured and belittled) Pierce has taken on cases with courage and conviction. She listed some of the incursions into rights in the last decade that make her fear for how states conduct themselves and observe the eschewing of what may once have been thought of as basic human rights: removing cases from jury trials and/or holding them in secret, the use of evidence against suspects that is not available to them to redress, correct, deny or combat, indefinite detention, control orders, deportations and extraordinary rendition.
Pierce also cautioned again the notion of “exceptionalism” – the assumption that America in particular has somehow earned the right to play by special rules. The government of the United Kingdom, according to Pierce, accesses a slippery and disingenuous attitude to the use of torture along the lines of “others do it; we don’t condone it” despite evidence indicating the Blair government knew very well of what was occurring. This “moral silence” has, in Pierce’s view, added to the abuse and demonisation of individuals such as Begg.
When queried about how she chooses her cases, Pierce paused then replied simply that she takes cases “if someone asks me”; after an audience member asked about if she worries about her own life being under surveillance, Pierce appeared bemused but eventually shrugged and revealed she did not really think much about it.
One of more painful and confronting moments in Pierce’s talk was when she was asked “what does torture do?” to the people who have been subjected to it. Echoing a writer I met in Edinburgh who worked with victims of torture, she said quietly:
As well as what we can’t imagine...young men unable to stand properly, to hear, or to see ... [their experiences are often ones] which they can’t describe. Some people can’t say [what happened] even if their lives literally depended on it [such as refugees applying for asylum]. Two people in the telling of their stories to me have fainted just speaking of it. People don’t go back to normality.
Secret trials, the right to hold suspects without charge or to refuse them entry to countries or indeed deport them without ever showing them the evidence for so doing, ‘military’ prisons such as Guantanamo that explicitly attempted to evade protecting basic human rights outlined in the Geneva convention, confessions obtained through torture, deceit and the threat of indefinite detention in isolation – is this really what twenty-first century democracies are meant to look like?
Kalinda AshtonWriter-in-Residence
