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	Torture does not work, as history shows by Robert Fisk, Peter Weiss USA / UK   February 7, 2008   The UN"s chief torture investigator criticised the US government yesterday for defending the use of "waterboarding", an interrogation method often described as a form of torture.   Manfred Nowak, the special rapporteur on torture, said: "This is absolutely unacceptable under international human rights law. The time has come that the government will actually acknowledge that they did something wrong and not continue trying to justify what is unjustifiable."   February 3, 2008   Torture Does Not Work, as History Shows, by Robert Fisk. (The Independent/UK)   There is no evidence that rendition and beatings and “water-boarding” has ended. Why else would the CIA admit in January that it had destroyed videotapes of prisoners being almost drowned - the “waterboarding” technique - before they could be seen by US investigators?   Yet only a few days ago, I came across a medieval print in which a prisoner has been strapped to a wooden chair, a leather hosepipe pushed down his throat and a primitive pump fitted at the top of the hose where an ill-clad torturer is hard at work squirting water down the hose. The prisoner’s eyes bulge with terror as he feels himself drowning, all the while watched by Spanish inquisitors who betray not the slightest feelings of sympathy with the prisoner. Who said “waterboarding” was new?   Another medieval print I found in a Canadian newspaper in November shows a prisoner under interrogation in what I suspect is medieval Germany. In this case, he has been strapped backwards to the outer edge of a wheel. Two hooded men are administering his agony. One is using a bellows to encourage a fire burning at the bottom of the wheel while the other is turning the wheel forwards so that the prisoner’s feet are moving into the flames. The eyes of this poor man - naked save for a cloth over his lower torso - are tight shut in pain. Two priests stand beside him, one cowled, the other wearing a robe over his surplice, a paper and pen in hand to take down the prisoner’s words.   Anthony Grafton, who has been working on a book about magic in Renaissance Europe, says that in the 16th and 17th centuries, torture was systematically used against anyone suspected of witchcraft, his or her statements taken down by sworn notaries - the equivalent, I suppose, of the CIA’s interrogation officers - and witnessed by officials who made no pretence that this was anything other than torture; no talk of “enhanced interrogation” from the lads who turned the wheel to the fire.   As Grafton recounts, “The pioneering medievalist Henry Charles Lea … wrote at length about the ways in which inquisitors had used torture to make prisoners confess heretical views and actions. An enlightened man writing in what he saw as an enlightened age, he looked back in horror at these barbarous practices and condemned them with a clarity that anyone reading public statements must now envy.”   There were professionals in the Middle Ages who were trained to use pain as a method of enquiry as well as an ultimate punishment before death. Men who were to be “hanged, drawn and quartered” in medieval London, for example, would be shown the “instruments” before their final suffering began with the withdrawal of their intestines in front of vast crowds of onlookers. Most of those tortured for information in medieval times were anyway executed after they had provided the necessary information to their interrogators. These inquisitions - with details of the torture that accompanied them - were published and disseminated widely so that the public should understand the threat that the prisoners had represented and the power of those who inflicted such pain upon them. No destroying of videotapes here. Illustrated pamphlets and songs, according to Grafton, were added to the repertory of publicity.   Ronnie Po-chia Hsia and Italian scholars Diego Quaglioni and Anna Esposito have studied the 15th-century Trent inquisition whose victims were usually Jews. In 1475, three Jewish households were accused of murdering a Christian boy called Simon to carry out the supposed Passover “ritual” of using his blood to make “matzo” bread. This “blood libel” - it was, of course, a total falsity - is still, alas, believed in many parts of the Middle East although it is frightening to discover that the idea was well established in 15th century Europe.   As usual, the podestà - a city official - was the interrogator, who regarded external evidence as providing mere clues of guilt. Europe was then still governed by Roman law which required confessions in order to convict. As Grafton describes horrifyingly, once the prisoner’s answers no longer satisfied the podestà, the torturer tied the man’s or woman’s arms behind their back and the prisoner would then be lifted by a pulley, agonisingly, towards the ceiling. “Then, on orders of the podestà, the torturer would make the accused ‘jump’ or ‘dance’ - pulling him or her up, then releasing the rope, dislocating limbs and inflicting stunning pain.”   When a member of one of the Trent Jewish families, Samuel, asked the podestà where he had heard that Jews needed Christian blood, the interrogator replied - and all this while, it should be remembered, Samuel was dangling in the air on the pulley - that he had heard it from other Jews. Samuel said that he was being tortured unjustly. “The truth, the truth!” the podestà shouted, and Samuel was made to “jump” up to eight feet, telling his interrogator: “God the Helper and truth help me.” After 40 minutes, he was returned to prison.   Once broken, the Jewish prisoners, of course, confessed. After another torture session, Samuel named a fellow Jew. Further sessions of torture finally broke him and he invented the Jewish ritual murder plot and named others guilty of this non-existent crime. Two tortured women managed to exonerate children but eventually, in Grafton’s words, “they implicated loved ones, friends and members of other Jewish communities”. Thus did torture force innocent civilians to confess to fantastical crimes. Oxford historian Lyndal Roper found that the tortured eventually accepted the view that they were guilty.   Grafton’s conclusion is unanswerable. Torture does not obtain truth. It will make most ordinary people say anything the torturer wants. Why, who knows if the men under the CIA’s “waterboarding” did not confess that they could fly to meet the devil. And who knows if the CIA did not end up believing him.   February 2, 2008   Torture unnecessary to get Information, by Peter Weiss (McClatchy-Tribune Information Services)   Last October I attended a reunion of World War II veterans who worked at a secret prisoner-of-war interrogation center at Fort Hunt, Va., near Washington, where many of the top Nazi scientists were interrogated. Some 20 of us, all in our 80s and 90s, came together, many for the first time in more than 60 years, for two days of reconnecting and recollecting.   The camp at Fort Hunt, which was devoted entirely to the interrogation of high-level prisoners of war was one of the most secret projects of the war and was codenamed “PO Box 1142.” Many of us on the PO Box 1142’s small staff, myself included, were refugees from Germany or Austria, since fluency in German was a requirement for the assignment.   At our reunion it was difficult to avoid reflecting on the contrast between the methods of interrogation we had used and those in vogue at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, not to mention the CIA’s “dark sites” in various unnamed countries. One of my fellow veterans said that he got more information from those he interrogated by playing chess or ping pong with them than he would ever have gotten through torture. Another said that we did not commit torture because when you torture you lose your humanity. In truth, some kind of pain-inflicting physical contact would never have occurred to us.   On the second day of our reunion, a retired Army general, an Air Force reserve colonel and a recently retired Defense Intelligence Agency official all commented on the results we were able to obtain at PO Box 1142 by complying with the Geneva Conventions. They also condemned the “aggressive” techniques the Bush administration has put into use as immoral, illegal and of doubtful validity.   Since that reunion in October I have asked myself what could account for this contrast in interrogation techniques. Could it be that the detainees at Fort Hunt had less important information to offer than those at Abu Ghraib? No, the German prisoners provided confirmation about the Nazis’ V-2 rocket work at Peenemuende and their later-abandoned efforts to develop nuclear weapons.   Could it be that the Fort Hunt detainees were more willing to talk because they knew Germany was about to lose the war? No, because some of the most valuable intelligence was obtained by 1142 interrogators in the early years of the war from captured U-boat officers.   Could it have been that “they” were not doing it to our people? No, because the whole notion of officially sanctioned “heightened aggressiveness” techniques originated with the Nazis.   What is it, then, that makes torture, for the first time in decades, a legitimate subject of pro and con discourse? What is it that allows President Bush to say “We do not torture” while refusing to admit that waterboarding, perhaps the cruelest form or torture since the days of the inquisition, constitutes torture? I can only come to one conclusion - that somehow the notion of humanity as the ultimate defense against torture must have fallen off the table.   * Peter Weiss is a retired intellectual property lawyer in New York; he wrote this for Human Rights Watch.
	UN anti-corruption conference seeks new ways to chase the money by Reuters & agencies   Jan 2008 (Reuters)   Poorer nations need more support to retrieve billions of dollars of stolen assets spirited away to global financial havens, officials at a United Nations anti-corruption conference in Bali said on Tuesday.   The task had been made tougher by the growing complexity of the world"s financial system and the emergence of new financial centres prepared to take shady funds, they said.   "This difficulty has been compounded by systems of high technology, where people can conduct banking through hot messaging systems, through their mobile phones or through the Internet," Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirajuda told a ministerial discussion on asset recovery on the sidelines of the conference, which is being attended by more than 100 countries.   Accordingly, the track record of finding assets is patchy. It took the Philippines almost 18 years to retrieve some assets from the estate of the late Ferdinand Marcos. The former president amassed up to $10 billion of stolen assets, a report by Transparency International estimates.   In the case of Nigeria"s Sani Abacha, estimated to have taken up to $5 billion, it took five to six years to get at any money.   Indonesia has made little progress tracking down the fortune of the late former President Suharto, put by Transparency International at $15-$35 billion.   Last September, the World Bank and the U.N. launched the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative, which aims to help poorer nations with technical assistance to retrieve assets.   "Time is of the essence" when trying to find the money, said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, which oversees a graft convention.   The United Nations Convention against Corruption, ratified by 107 nations, came into force three years ago and requires members to make corruption a criminal offence, as well as binding them to cooperate with each other over graft and to return stolen assets.   "Stolen assets rot quickly in idle bank accounts, rusty yachts, decaying real estate and devalued securities," Costa said in an earlier speech at the opening of the conference.   Huguette Labelle, chairwoman of Transparency International, said in an interview on Monday she was worried about the failure of some global financial centres -- such as Liechtenstein, Singapore and Switzerland -- to ratify the anti-graft convention.   Bribes received by public officials from less developed countries are put at $20 billion to $40 billion per year, or between 20 to 40 percent of official development assistance.   Robert Klitgaard, a corruption expert at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles, told a lecture at the conference that it was key to make an example of some high-profile corruptors."If a few big fish are fried and they see that" it sends a powerful signal, he said.   Jan 2008   Western developed nations have been urged to do more to assist the recovery of an estimated $25 billion to $50 billion stolen from developing countries each year and hidden abroad.   The World Bank"s managing director overseeing anti-corruption efforts, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, yesterday urged delegates from more than 100 countries to remove legal obstacles to the return of stolen funds.   Ms Okonjo-Iweala said that up to $50 billion stolen annually could have gone to food, health and infrastructure for those who needed it most.   Her call was joined by Indonesian Foreign Minister Hassan Wirayuda, who said Indonesia was struggling to recover funds hidden overseas. He said: "Doing it alone is not an easy task."   Mr Wirayuda declined to answer questions on whether his nation would continue to pursue up to $40 billion estimated to have been stolen by recently deceased dictator Soeharto.   Yesterday"s meeting highlighted the beginning of a UN and World Bank-backed Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (STAR). At the September launch of the initiative, a list was distributed of the world"s most corrupt leaders — naming Mr Soeharto as the world"s worst.   Mr Wirayuda emphasised STAR was "not case-specific; it is a technical assistance program to enhance capacity". It would remain Indonesia"s highest priority to recover stolen public funds, he said.   Ms Okonjo-Iweala said many countries retained "convoluted legal obstacles" to recovering stolen funds — pointing out it took the Philippines 18 years to recover assets from the Marcos regime. She pleaded: "Lead by example; assist developing countries to recover assets rather than standing in their way."   Ms Okonjo-Iweala supported the reversal of the burden of proof to recover stolen assets — allowing the seizure of funds from abroad without a conviction against their owner, who would then need to prove they were earned legally.   This week"s meeting will discuss the implementation of the Convention Against Corruption, which came into force in 2005. The UN is calling for an acceleration of anti-corruption efforts, introducing a mechanism to review the convention"s progress and for more nations to join its 140 signatories.
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