As the American psychologist and architect of the Bush-era torture programme, Dr James Mitchell, took the stand last week, I was reminded of Timothy Snyder’s Twenty Lessons on Tyranny. He wrote ‘If lawyers had followed the norm of no execution without trial, if doctors had accepted the rule of no surgery without consent…then the Nazi regime would have been much harder pressed to carry out the atrocities.’
Eighteen years have passed since the opening of Guantanamo Bay and implementation of the (now defunct) US ‘enhanced interrogation’ programme – a clinically friendly name for a torture house that included waterboarding and other forms of abuse. Was Mitchell finally standing trial for his crimes? No. He defiantly gave evidence to a pre-trial hearing in the American military war court; his testimony mirroring one of his earlier justifications: “I’m just a guy who got asked to do something for his country”.
Since 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, a myriad of human rights abuses have been committed and justified in complete disregard of the UN Convention Against Torture; and by countries that once led the way in establishing the torture ban as a legal norm.
