Current Affairs Essay

Medical opinion is that the incarceration of prisoners in indefinite long-term solitary is a form of mental torture. As such it is contrary to the international Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, adopted by the UN in 1984 and ratified by the United States. The supermax prison at Guantánamo Bay has been described by the lawyer Clive Stafford Smith as "harsher than any of the many Death Row prisons I have visited in the past 25 years." Stafford Smith says of his client Binyam Mohamed - who was rendered to Morocco by the US for 18 months of torture - that his recent behaviour in Guantánamo indicates that he is suffering a mental breakdown.

Of course, the United States is not the only country that uses torture. It is endemic in the Russian penal system, and in China's; both the largest country in the world and the most populous torture their own citizens. But the conduct of the US is the saddest case of a nation corrupted, because it is no longer that "shining city on a hill" that once represented a standard for the world to emulate; and because it is the US leadership itself that has seen fit to depart so radically from America's core values.

On the evidence provided by Andy Worthington and the other authoritative books referred to here, the judgment has to be that the US over-reacted to the events of 9/11. Quite apart from the perverse decision to go to war in Iraq, what other verdict could there be, considering its adoption of torture as a method of punishment, and torture as a technique for the gathering of faulty intelligence?

Jeremy Putley writes articles and book reviews on injustice, cruelty and oppression. His previous writing has appeared in The Political Quarterly, The Spectator, and Prospect. He lives in Yorkshire, England.