The government is, on behalf of you and me, involved in the worst type of man’s inhumanity to man — torture. Yet with the honourable exceptions of William Hague and Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative party, the party I wholeheartedly support, the party that talks of compassionate conservatism, is failing to speak out about it when it should be shouting from the rooftops. Think of your wife or child screaming in unbearable pain, deliberately inflicted. The mere thought is enough for me to know that torture is unacceptable under any circumstances.
Yet some people need to be convinced by other arguments. There are plenty. The first is that torture does not work. General Massu, a French commander in Algeria, said, ‘Torture is not indispensable in time of war; we could have got along without it very well.’
Another crucial point: torture disgusts most people and our involvement, passive or otherwise, recruits terrorists by making us loathed.
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