The Truth Will Out?

The revelation today that 'Bush's Brain', former senior adviser Karl Rove, has admitted he was 'proud' of the use of waterboarding as a form of 'information gathering' may be startling to some - simply necessary to others.

Under legal notes passed at the time, Bush's administration effectively relegated waterboarding to a 'non-torture' status therefore allowing its use in extracting information from alleged terrorists. It was the non-torture method of choice in places like Guantanamo and if that was considered non-torture, then the mind boggles at what methods were used in the name of 'getting the truth' on non-US territory.

Waterboarding is a lovely method of 'questioning'. It involves putting a prisoner into a position where water is doused over their face so that they cannot breath, therefore making them think they are drowning. Clearly, it is a method which may not work first time and so it is repeated ad nausea until the information required is extracted. For anyone who has been in the very terrifying position of believing they are going to be drowned, there are few more dreadful feelings in life, especially when you know that the difference between you living or dying is entirely controlled by someone else.

Under such pressure, it is argued from laymen to eminent psychologists then the prisoner will say anything in order to stop the torture. Often prisoners will say many things, much contradicting what they have already said in an avalanche of extracted information in the vain hope that the investigators get what they believe they are looking for. In fact, so primal is the whole thing that more intelligent people than I would strongly argue that any such information extracted under such duress is most likely to be unreliable.

Rove reckons that umpteen terrorist plots were foiled by using such methods. Perhaps it could be argued that umpteen plots that US investigators wanted to believe were to be perpetrated were uncovered. After all, amid the failures in Intelligence Agencies leading up to the Iraq War to get even the basics right, the last thing you would want is that new, more aggressive methods, actually found that no new attacks were known about. It could be argued that success rates were written by the investigators in order to justify their methods and their jobs, for that matter.

Anyway, it's a moot point as the method is rightly outlawed by the Obama Administration and Guantanamo hardly achieved a thing with only one tribunal enacted so far. Even the famous case implying MI5 knowingly gleaning information from torture seemed to come from a person who was ultimately freed with no charges against him, to be hailed as some kind of hero. But, with the definition of 'non-torture' afforded to waterboarding and its enthusiastic approval by Government officials, would it not be interesting to find out what would have been revealed had we used the methods in official inquiries such as the Chilcot Inquiry?

Perhaps the sleek, svelte calm of Tony Blair and Alistair Campbell would have been broken. Perhaps the contradictory evidence from Jack Straw might have been tested for veracity. Perhaps we would have easily got Gordon Brown to tell the truth about his spending policy when many officials before him had attested to it.

But in reality it is all about the skill and tenacity of the questioner to obtain information. Sir John Chilcot and his team seem to be just writing down whatever is said with no cross referencing or rebuttal questions to test the truth. I watched the film 'Frost/Nixon' last night and saw how devastating good questioning can be in terms of putting powerful, intelligent people on edge and taking them into territories in their minds that they do not want to go - forcing the real truth out of them. I am an exponent of testing truth in interview techniques as I have a firm belief that those coming for jobs only want to talk about what they want to talk about and highlight themselves to their own advantage. Getting at the truth in an interview is vital as only under pressure will you find out how people will really perform.

The Chilcot Inquiry has had lines of questioning which frankly could have been put together by school kids and the follow ups to answers have been woefully absent. Ministers have gone before the Inquiry and basically said what they want with impunity from challenge, even when others have already said something entirely contradictory. It's as if the whole thing is choreographed and scripted to once again suit the Government and the stooges involved.

Perhaps Karl Rove is right - waterboarding and the like does get at the truth. Personally, I think it would be far better if we got a bunch of investigators in the Chilcot Inquiry who really want to get at the truth and who have a healthy cynicism about how Politicians and their mandarins lie to protect themselves. We will have spent millions, learnt nothing and will repeat the same mistakes time and again until we find out just why Iraq was so important for us all to be lied to in order to justify a war.

With that central question asked, perhaps we would have got somewhere near the truth.

Short on Credibility?

It was keenly anticipated, but Clare Short's turn at the Chilcot Inquiry has already slipped to the back water pages of the internet news sites.

Despite some stunning revelations which confirmed much of the thinking that Tony Blair did much of his decision making outside Cabinet, ran the country with just a few hand-picked, non-elected advisers, spun the truth and somehow got the Attorney General to change his tune, miraculously in favour of an all-out war when a few weeks before the legal case was nil - despite all this, there was something tawdry and sleazy about Short's evidence.

Part of it was that Alistair Campbell had already laid his marker on her when he gave 'evidence'. He had effectively marginalised her by making her appear 'unreliable', suggesting she was a loose cannon and a potential threat to us all. Further, the whole saga of her resignation was an on-off affair and it appeared she wavered about her decision, loyalty and, perhaps, ambition. Did she go because she could not get what she wanted or because she had a conscience? With Robin Cook it was unequivocal; with Short it was questionable. All the more pity that Cook is not around to give his view, as indeed Dr. David Kelly is also not around too.

Clare Short said a lot of damaging things but her colloquial and slangy style made her sound, frankly, unintelligent and, not a little, vindictive. She came across as having an axe to grind - Campbell's careful depiction of her was at the front of my mind when she referred to the country being run by 'Blair and his mates'. Great pub talk but hardly the accurate description for a major Inquiry. She made the Attorney General's volte-face on the legality of the war sound just like the nation's view of 'how could he move so far in just a few weeks' but there was no substantiation of her view and therefore it was no better testimony than that of you or I in this matter.

But what the whole performance did illustrate, if nothing else, was that the country was in the hands of a very small number of mainly unelected people, that Cabinet was just an 'For Your Information Only' pool, where there was little debate, and Parliament was for mere ratification - with the landslide majority effectively stifling any questions or any chance of democracy.

No matter when and where or for what reason Blair decided to go to war, once he had done so there was no turning back and he just made sure that it looked as though it was necessary. Looking back at the evidence that was presented to the Cabinet, Parliament and the nation, it now looks a laughable attempt to provide an excuse for such action akin to a young school kid making up a story of why it was late to class.

What Clare Short's evidence produced, along with Campbell's and Blair's, is how little real thought went into the whole process of decision making, how little debate was invoked and how trivialised were the thoughts, views and consciences of the British people. We were the last people to be considered and the least. Our vote had been cast long ago and was now a chip in the game of world power. By allying with the US, Britain was at the Top Table of international power and that was vital for Blair's future beyond being Prime Minister. He had suddenly found his raison d'etre, his legacy and his future in one go. He would forever be known as the hero who rid the world of Saddam Hussein.

To use a boxing analogy, Hussein was a former heavyweight who still thought he could fight and was lured into the ring with no training and no fitness. He was a spent force. All he had left was his country's oil, it's proximity to Iran, and that he would make a good butt for the vengeance of the United States for 9/11 even though it was clear he was no more a threat to the US than a defenceless old boxer. The United States had a symbolic war it could win.

But they didn't. Iraq, like Afghanistan, has been a fiasco that has cost $billions and many lives at a time we could afford neither. The legacy will be seen as two zealous, power-hungry fools wanting to make a strike for their faith and their egos.

The only thing Short confirmed yesterday was the image of a dictatorial pseudo-President running our country and that democracy had been suspended. If that is not a case for wholesale electoral reform, then I don't know what is.

Defending The Indefensible

Well we got what we wanted. Alistair Campbell gave his version of events leading to the Iraq Invasion at the Chilcot Inquiry yesterday and it just made us more angry at the arrogance of the whole affair.

It could have been any of the recollections to set me off but what really astounded me was Campbell's unfathomable defence of the 2002 dossier on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) - the crux of the argument to go to war. Campbell said he, 'Defends every word of it.'

I find this incredible given that we knew not long after that parts of it relating to the infamous '45 minute' assertion that WMDs could be deployed in the field to threaten British Sovereign territory within 45 minutes were plagiarised from an internet version of an old student thesis. Further, how can you defend a document's credibility when at the very time Hans Blix and his weapons inspectors were indicating that no WMD or manufacturing capability had been found. In fact, Blix was pleading with the US and UK to hold off and give his team more time to find the weapons or chemical factories - and as this was central to the UN Resolution which the UK and US used to go with the invasion it was morally right that evidence should be found. Meanwhile, Saddam Hussein was issuing statements that there were no WMD which was the truth while the UK and the US just said he was lying.

At best this was Intelligence communities gone so far wrong as to make their credibility defunct or, at worst, Government arrogance in the face of clear evidence against a war under UN law. Campbell now, and then, behaves as if this is irrelevant but it isn't. It is the foundation for a model of peace that came out of the World Wars - the statute that stops a country or countries from invading just because they don't like what the others do. Violate this principle and we have anarchy on the planet once more.

For me, the faith-based zeal of leaders like Bush and Blair was no better than the zeal of faith-based terrorists who attempt regime change through atrocities. Blair and Bush just used armies and economies instead - manipulating international law to their favour through misuse of power.

I believe it was a time of great shame for Britain. The outcome in Iraq is as questionable as the outcome in Afghanistan - when the plan is merely to kick out the old and install a new friend, beware of getting what you ask for .