Bush must understand: torturers are no better than terrorists

SO, George Bush and Dick Cheney have at last been forced to accept a law that will make it illegal for the CIA to use torture in the "war against terror".

What are we supposed to make of this? Why was this necessary? Were the United States authorities using prisons overseas? Was the CIA torturing its prisoners?

We don't know, but the White House's resistance to the measure can only make us suspect that it was. The implications of this are jaw-dropping.

The new law has become necessary because of a breakdown of trust. The president of the United States was unable to say unequivocally that his administration does not and will not use torture to get information.

He wanted to protect CIA members from litigation stemming from allegations of torture. What! Why should they need it? Congress has now had to move to make torture specifically illegal. It looks suspiciously as if we in the West have been led by a regime that condones, and even uses, torture. It makes the Watergate break-in look like a naughty peccadillo.

What Bush needs to understand is this: if your security forces operate beyond the law - and torture by any measure is beyond the law - they become no better than terrorists.

The very existence of Guantanamo Bay is an attempt by the US government to evade the full rigours of the rule of law. Its presence outside the US landmass is used as an excuse to exempt the US from the obligations placed upon it by its very own constitution.

The same applies to these alleged prisons in eastern Europe. Any last vestige of moral high ground we might have had after invading Iraq is blown away if the US is found to be using the same tactics as Saddam to get information.

It's worth considering what it is we are fighting for. Both the terrorist and the state are, after all, using lethal force in pursuit of a cause. So what is it that separates them? While the terrorist is accountable to nobody but himself, the state is accountable to the law. In democratic countries it is the rule of law, a law put in place by an accountable legislature and upheld and maintained by an impartial judiciary, which allows the state to use force in our name.

The allegations of mistreatment of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay and unidentified CIA prisons overseas are part of the battleground. Imagination, deviousness and perhaps even some dirty tricks may usefully be deployed against those who operate without any known scruples. But in the frontline against terrorists, accountability to the law must remain an abiding principle.

When fighting terrorists, we must be clear about what values we stand for. If we don't know what they are, or if we routinely bend them to suit our short-term convenience - or if the world believes that "the land of the free" tortures its prisoners - then the "war against terror" is lost before it's begun.

Ian Gardiner is a former Royal Marine and former Secretary to the NATO Military Committee.