Long, long ago, not far after the dawn of time ( well, May 2004 actually) , I wrote this article:

‘THE worst dungeons in the world are created by people who think they are doing good. Their belief in the holiness of their aims excuses almost anything. From the Spanish Inquisition to the Marxist interrogators in Moscow's Lubyanka, the cruellest torturers have been the ones who thought they were saving souls or building a beautiful new world.

Now it is our turn. America and Britain went into the 21st Century torture business when they adopted their new ethical foreign policy, going round the world overthrowing wicked regimes.

In the case of Anthony Blair, all this saintly idealism may yet lead him into the dock of one of the international courts he now claims to be so keen on.

The people who nearly put General Pinochet on trial may before too long find the power and the will to do the same to a British Prime Minister, especially if the Iraq war turns as rancid as it threatens to do.

George W. Bush will not be joining him, since he, with more cunning than his ally, has refused to submit America to any foreign judges. It was a wise choice.

This could go very high indeed, now that Mr Blair and people like him have spread the idea that statesmen should answer in court for atrocities done on their watch.

But at the moment, everyone is concentrating on the poor bloody infantry of the jails and interrogation suites, the wretched little people who did the kicking and sodomising and other twisted humiliation. They are, as is usual in these cases, disturbingly ordinary.

Some of them turn out to have been private contractors, cooks and drivers who just happened to be available, about as far from the hooded, sinister image of the professional tormentor that it is possible to get. And yet they did these things, before clocking off for an ordinary American evening of hamburgers, beer and TV. Sooner or later, we are going to have to find out why they thought they were right to act like this, who wrote their training manuals, and why they believed they would get away with it.

They do not even seem to have heard of the Geneva Conventions, hardly surprising given their own Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, has bypassed these time-honoured safeguards in his prison-camp at Guantanamo and his still-more-covert, night-and-fog cellblocks at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan.

But they probably had heard of the suggestions, seriously made by respectable American lawyers, that torture should be licensed by the state to deal with the menace of terror.

Private Lynndie England and her friends, dim, pathetic people in any other circumstances, were transformed into fiends out of hell because they had reason to believe that politicians and their superior officers had in some way given them permission. When they come to trial it will be interesting to see who they try to drag down with them. For it is clear that a great free nation, based upon the rule of law, became convinced it was leading a righteous struggle against total evil and could do what it liked in this cause.

Britain, in its turn, led by a man who makes a public fuss of his Christian faith and imagines he can save the world, decided to join in this strange, limitless conflict.

AMERICA turned the ruins of the World Trade Centre into the foundation of a wild, uncontrollable conceit - the 'War On Terror'. Actually, and it is now just about possible to say this without being accused of treachery or callousness, September 11 2001 was a serious but highly limited terrorist attack. It did not cripple the economy or the power structures of the US. By the standards of modern warfare, the casualties were mercifully low.

But George W. Bush and his closest advisers chose to make it a cause for panic and fake apocalypse. It was they who went into hiding as if America had been invaded from space, they who closed their borders in a pointless spasm of meaningless security, they who inflamed their people into vengeance and a bonfire of many of their own liberties.

And it was they who created the conditions under which British soldiers could be plausibly accused of beating and kicking and urinating on hooded, bound prisoners; and the conditions under which Americans indulged in perverted sadistic behaviour and then proudly photographed each other as they did it.

We were not saints before this. British treatment of Mau Mau prisoners in Kenya in the Fifties was a lasting disgrace, and our retreat from Empire was nothing like as kind and gentle as we like to claim. But the ideas of European superiority that allowed such barbarity vanished long ago, along with the Empire.

All nations do filthy deeds in war - through desperation, haste, clumsiness, rage, exhaustion or fury. They blow civilians to pieces with bombs and shells, shoot surrendering captives or leave them to drown in freezing seas.

Most of us have met the very decent, kindly men who found themselves doing such things between 1939 and 1945, hardened themselves at the time, and have quietly regretted them ever since. We do not wonder often enough why old soldiers are so reluctant to talk about a war we like to think of as glorious. They saw things no man should see and in many cases did things no man should do. They were in danger, fighting an enemy who could do the same to them and often did.

BUT the brutal humiliation of helpless, disarmed prisoners, miles from the rage of battle, can never be excused by the ferocity of combat.

It is done well away from any fighting front. It requires cold-blooded, calm determination, reflection and decision.

The beast within us has to be coaxed out and allowed to feel safe. I do not think there is any evidence that such methods were used by Britain during World War Two, when for many years our entire national survival was in doubt.

Nor did the US behave in this way during that war. And, while it was certainly guilty of atrocities in Vietnam, they were the result of pent-up frustration after years of fighting against an unseen enemy who hid himself in the midst of the population. This business of piling naked men into pyramids, or tying dog-leads round their necks, or putting women's knickers over their heads, or sodomising them with broomsticks, is something new.

And it is by no means the worst of it. Few now try to deny that in Bagram airbase, much more severe torture and degradation have taken place. And it is pretty much accepted that the CIA has recently subcontracted torture to various Arab regimes, including Syria and Jordan, who are used to the sound of screams coming from dank cellars.

Perhaps we shall have to get used to it too. Like the old Soviet regime, we now have clever, charming professional thinkers who take the view that you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs.

Listen to these words, written in April 2002 by Robert Cooper, a diplomat and foreign policy adviser to Anthony Blair: 'The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards. Among ourselves, we operate on the basis of laws and open co-operative security. But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th Century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.'

'Whatever is necessary' was always the licence for those who believed the end justified the means. The law of the jungle turns out to be exactly what we have been using in Abu Ghraib and probably Basra too. No doubt Mr Cooper, a kindly bicyclist and ballroom dancing-enthusiast, never imagined the squalid end of such thinking, but he should have done. So should Mr Blair.

But our Premier was already well launched on his romantic quest to save the world with bombs and bayonets. The Prime Minister made an astonishing speech in Chicago in April 1999. It justified intervention in Kosovo - and anywhere else - on the grounds that such interventions would do good.

FEW now visit the dismal mess post-war Kosovo has become, but apart from all its other problems of unresolved ethnic hatred and continuing ethnic cleansing, political instability and violent gangsterism, Amnesty International reported this week that the Western occupation there is directly responsible for a huge expansion of sex slavery, engulfing hundreds of women, many under-aged, in torture, rape, abuse and crime. So much for doing good.

By October 2001 Mr Blair was pledging to intervene all over Africa. 'The state of Africa,' he thundered, 'is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world, as a community, focused on it, we could heal it.'

Perhaps fortunately for Africa, he has not yet tried to do this. But in the glow of righteousness provided by September 11, he has joined in a general assault on real human rights unprecedented in modern history. His government was feeble in the face of the gross breach of civilised rules at Guantanamo. It constantly stirs fears of terrorist outrages here, and has for the first time in modern British history imprisoned people secretly and without trial.

In this general atmosphere of panic, we have also seen a sad collapse of the normal rules of justice.

Every few weeks groups of Middle-Eastern men are rounded up amid off-the-record briefings that a new terrorist outrage has been foiled.

Usually, the arrested people are freed without charge, as quietly as possible, a few weeks later.

Even if they were charged, it is hard to see how they could get a fair trial after the treatment they have been given. But the messianic struggle against the spectre of Osama bin Laden seems to justify almost anything.

If there ever is a serious terrorist attack on the British mainland - and it is pretty likely that there will be - people and government will demand culprits to be tried and punished.

What methods might eventually be used against suspects in our police stations to obtain the necessary confessions, even if they are the wrong people?

Can we now be so sure the sort of moral pollution that has gripped western troops in Iraq will not seep back into our state at home?

Or that, in many ways, it has not already done so, if only in the form of institutionalised lying?’

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There’s one major error in the aryicle , which I think was pardonable at the time. It’s now pretty much accepted that Britain did use forms of torture on some German captives, in a London building , during the later years of the war (I’ll try to look up references) .

But I looked it up because of the mention of Robert Cooper in this article in Friday’s ‘Independent’ by the thoughtful, level-headed and knowledgeable Mary Dejevsky (a former Moscow Correspondent for the Times, who did that job with great distinction):

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/does-the-eus-involvement-in-ukraine-amount-to-a-form-of-colonialism-9251779.html

This article is interestingly distinct from the standard-issue boilerplate of most commentators, in both observing and assessing the current behaviour of the ‘West’ in Ukraine, which I think should be called ‘soft aggression’. It also points out that EU membership, for East European nations, is far from being a guarantee of economic growth and prosperity, as so many media figures and politicians assert. And Mrs Dejevsky dares to use the term ’colonial power’ in reference to the EU, a truth which I think has been waiting to be expressed, but which I preferred not to use explicitly because it would be dismissed as ‘extremism’ , and so not thought about.

But there’s also a gripping detail. I should have known, but didn’t, that Robert Cooper had turned up in Catherine Ashton’s office. This is yet more evidence that the EU is an extension of Blair by other means, but it also entertains the possibility that the EU is a sort of colonialist or at least interventionist power, and that those nations which it approaches for ostensibly economic agreements are actually being involved in something much bigger.

Let us re-examine that passage : ‘But when dealing with more old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception, whatever is necessary to deal with those who still live in the 19th Century world of every state for itself. Among ourselves, we keep the law but when we are operating in the jungle, we must also use the laws of the jungle.'

Is Russia one of those ‘old-fashioned kinds of states outside the postmodern continent’? Isn’t this just a way of defining any who don’t join the post-Chicago globalist consensus as backward and beyond the pale, not entitled to the normal considerations if diplomacy and law, and always exposed to the possibility of destabilisation? Is it therefore legitimate use deception and ‘whatever is necessary’ against Moscow? And what, precisely *is* ‘necessary’? And isn’t it interesting that John Kerry, the American Secretary of State also refers to Russian methods as ‘19th-century’. Actually, Russia tried to use several 21st-century methods to deter the EU’s aggressive grab at Ukraine, including many years of open and explicit protests at NATO’s relentless westward expansion, its own aid package and the very postmodern gas threat. It was when these didn’t work that it used naked force.

By the way, I note that critics of Russia accuse it of ‘expansion’ into Ukraine. This raises an interesting question, one again, of title to territory and where it comes from. Was French repossession of Alsace-Lorraine after 1918 ‘expansion’. Or was Czechoslovakia’s repossession of the Sudetenland in 1945 ‘expansionism’? Actually, both of these territories contain (or at the time contained) national minorities who were not necessarily comfortable with the rule of their liberators. Both have complex histories (some might say that Strasbourg is now French because of ‘expansionism’ on the part of Louis XIV. The main difference is that Ukraine was taken from Russia in 1992 by diplomacy, and by Russia’s absence of power, rather than by naked force (though of course naked force had been used to take Ukraine from Russia twice in the 20th century, events whichmost certainly influence all involved today).

Then there’s this gripping article for the same newspaper by the interesting and original Robert Fisk, which I mention just because it made my jaw drop:

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/turkeys-actions-in-syria-see-pm-recep-tayyip-erdogan-go-from-model-middle-east-strongman-to-tinpot-dictator-9252366.html

This is not just a welcome sign that the generally kindly coverage of Mr Erdogan is at last coming to a long-merited end (how lonely it has been, pointing out what he’s really like, though Robert Fisk has always been critical of Turkey) The suggestions it makes, or rather which it says Seymour Hersh makes, about the Sarin episode in Syria (you have to keep reading) are absolutely devastating if they are true.