The EU, torture secrets and dealing with the truth.

When on 16 April 2009 the US Justice Department released official memoranda written in 2002 and 2005, the information contained in these in relation to interrogation techniques of terror suspects was already in the public domain. Similar memoranda containing sinister accounts of how legal arguments were elaborated to provide legal grounds for ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’, incompatible with the domestic and international obligations of the US,, had already been leaked to the press as well as being officially released in 2004. The released reports also included the decision by George W. Bush that placed Guantanamo detainees in a legal limbo. Thus we already knew that the multiplication of allegations of mistreatment and torture that came with the fight against terrorism in the post September 11 scenario were not the result of occasional spurts of sadism on the part of security and armed force personnel breaking rules. Philippe Sands’ work, Torture Team (Allen Lane, 2008) contains one of the most exemplary accounts of how a process of moral disengagement permeated public policies at the highest level under the pretext of fighting terrorism