A balanced view of torture

A lesson on human rights in a school in Woolwich

"Do [Amnesty International's] lesson plans give equal weight to both sides of the issue? Certainly in the lesson at Woolwich, more time (25 minutes) was spent watching an emotive film on the unfairness of denying Guantanamo Bay detainees their right to a fair trial and the hardship of the detainees' families than was given to the other side of the argument (15 minutes).

And the other side of the argument was presented in a less engaging form: a short, written press release from the White House, setting out the US government's justifications for holding suspected terrorists in Guantanamo without trial."

Oh dear. And I wonder what a really balanced look at Guantanamo might be like. An interview with the inmates, telling us that the propaganda about the conditions in the secret camp is just that - propaganda? Maybe we would learn that they actually have televisions in their rooms, 5 items of fresh fruit a day, and the opportunity to study a foreign language.

But no: the authorities at Guantanamo strangely won't allow interviews with inmates. I wonder what they are afraid we might learn, if all is really hunky-dory there.

I wonder too, what a balanced look at the unbalanced idea of the right to fair trial might look like: some interviews with retired Colonels from the Daily Telegraph or Daily Mail, telling us how they cannot sleep at night because they are afraid of terrorist attacks on their country homes in Gloucestershire? A film about how good life was for good citizens before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights came along (or the Bill of Rights)? A look at some of the evidence which the US authorities have accumulated against those terrorists sitting in Guantanamo Bay? Perhaps that might stop our 15-year olds feeling sympathy with their families or their plight.

But no: the US authorities won't allow us (or the detainees) to look at the evidence. As of today, not one of the Guantánamo detainees - and there have been 775 since January 2002 - has been convicted of a criminal offence by the USA. 10 of them (only), it is true, have been charged for trial by military commissions, but these trials were then ruled unlawful by the US Supreme Court. The Red Cross, which is about as cautious, as secretive (and as 'balanced'?) an organisation as I would have thought it possible to find, made it publicly known that "The main concern for us is the U.S. authorities ... have effectively placed them beyond the law... After more than 18 months of captivity, the internees have no idea about their fate, no means of recourse through any legal mechanism. They have been placed in a legal vacuum, a legal black hole. This, for the ICRC, is unacceptable."

So how about a balanced view of the inhumane and degrading treatment - the torture - which has been identified as standard practice in Guantanamo by all independent observers? How about presenting the positive side of that treatment in a 'more engaging form' for our 15-year olds?

The balanced Red Cross investigators, according to a leaked report, found a system devised to break the will of prisoners through "humiliating acts, solitary confinement, temperature extremes, use of forced positions." They went on to say that "The construction of such a system, whose stated purpose is the production of intelligence, cannot be considered other than an intentional system of cruel, unusual and degrading treatment and a form of torture,"

I suppose that Jessica Shepherd would regard it as very unbalanced of me to quote these extracts, without giving the Bush-Cheney administration the chance to put the 'other' side. But quite apart from the fact that the Bush-Cheney administration are determined to keep everything about Guantanamo Bay a secret, so it is extremely difficult to get their gloss on torture, the end of the presumption of innocence, and the end of the right to fair trial; quite apart from the fact that organisations like the Red Cross and even Amnesty International are extremely careful (some might say too careful) to check both sides of the story, to hear from Bush and Cheney and anyone else who might balance the information they receive on the ground - quite apart from all of that, I cannot for the life of me imagine what that 'other side' might be. I cannot imagine anything that might make what is happening there now anything other than wholly unacceptable - either legally or morally, either from the point of view of international law, or from the point of view of basic human values. More importantly: I am very far from sure that even if we could provide an 'acceptable' viewpoint on Guantanamo Bay, that is what we should be giving our 15-year olds.

Does Jessica Shepherd perhaps think that the time has come to rewrite the international declarations of human rights which the world put together after the horrors of the Nazi holocaust? Because if she doesn't, she needs to explain what a 'balanced lesson' on the issue of people being held without charge, for years on end, and under inhumane conditions might look like. And why on earth we need it.

I suspect that if it was the Burmese monks who were being held in secret camps, the balance might be thought to be unnecessary - just as it was with the Soviet Union. I suspect that on the issue of Burma, our 15-year olds will not be required to consider the military rulers' side of the story in a 'more engaging form'.

Have a look at these nuggets to get a really unbalanced view

POSTSCRIPT
I wrote to Jessica Shepherd twice, to see if she could explain the question of balance. But she did not respond, nor did anyone else at the Guardian.