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Torture is torture!

By any reckoning Human Rights Watch, like Amnesty International, is a respected organisation.

Joanne Mariner is the terrorism and counterterrorism director of Human Rights Watch and writing in AlterNet, here, says:

"Last week, George W. Bush gave a speech admitting, for the first time, the CIA's secret detention program. A fuller description of the kind of torture comitted in this detention program is contained in John le Carre's new novel. Called The Mission Song, the novel includes an extended description of torture that takes up several pages of text.

President Bush spared the nation such excruciating details. He spoke vaguely and euphemistically of an "alternative set of [interrogation] procedures" - "tough" and "necessary" tactics that made uncooperative detainees talk."

And no less importantly:

"But to call the tribunals that Bush is advocating "military commissions" is nearly as euphemistic as calling torture "alternative procedures." Military lawyers have disowned them, and penal experts all over the world have expressed dismay.

Whatever the president might argue, torture and kangaroo courts are not going to solve the problem of terrorism."

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