British protesters against the American detention centre at Guantanamo Bay stage a protest outside the US Embassy in London's Grosvenor Square, 2009.Fiona Hanson/Press Association. All rights reserved.Governments across liberal democracies maintain that their intelligence agencies and national security services require secrecy from the public to avoid compromising intelligence sources, methods and ultimately, their effectiveness. Such secrecy makes it difficult for civil society – including the press, NGOs, academics and professional organisations – to assess political-intelligence elite claims about the evidence underpinning intelligence and national security policies. In turn, this makes it hard to independently evaluate these policies’ appropriateness and effectiveness.
This is problematic because, in the heat of efforts to prevent terrorism, policies get instituted with no proven track record, and that negatively impact society in terms of social cohesion, trust, professional ethics and human rights norms and compliance. This has been demonstrated in the US Detention and Interrogation Programme, and appears to be happening today in the UK’s CHANNEL Programme.
US Detention and Interrogation Programme
Following 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contracted two US military psychologists, Jim Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, to generate an interrogation paradigm to psychologically break down Al-Qa’eda detainees’ resistance to their interrogators. This highly secret Detention and Interrogation Programme comprised detainee isolation (including from their own lawyers); and total environmental control involving indefinite detention at prisons like Guantánamo Bay and secret prisons across the world, as well as a regime of ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ (EITs, a.k.a. torture) including stress positions, sleep deprivation and waterboarding (mock drowning). It aimed to disrupt detainees’ ontological security, thereby making them more likely to divulge information about whether future attacks were being planned and where future threats might emanate.
