Rendition to torture is not less vile than torture itself, and it is moral cowardice into the bargain.

Either torture someone yourself and acknowledge that that’s who you are – and therefore you’re no longer the good guys, you’re just another bunch of murderous thugs in a world which already has a superfluity – or put your hand up against torture in any form. Sending people away to another country so that they can be cut with razorblades while you slip notes under the door and salve your conscience with assurances of good conduct from regimes noted for bad conduct is not clean, it’s just pathetically craven.

That said, I can see how you could convince yourself it was necessary, if the environment around you was conducive – and it sure as hell has been in the UK over the last decade and more. I know about the Lucifer Effect. I’ve seen the Milgram tapes. I get it. And I have heard – though I do not agree with – the political arguments about the necessity of torture in combating terrorism. Never mind that the former head of MI5 does not agree. Never mind that the senior figures I’ve spoken to in this arena have no faith in information gained through torture and would rather mount an operation based on a soft interrogation. Never mind that the information we got from torture between 2001 and 2003 ‘confirmed’ any number of things which weren’t true.

Never mind any of that. Let’s accept, for a second, that there might be a rationale for sending someone away to be tortured.

Can somebody please tell me how anyone could imagine that sending their kids along with them was in any way at all the act of a government or a nation which deserves respect? Because it has to be acknowledged that kids do get tortured. They are not immune. Wives get tortured, too. It’s a great way to cause pain which never goes away. Grade A torture skillz.

But if there’s a way in which it’s not just frankly evil and criminal, I’m not seeing it.

Labour MP Tom Harris doesn’t like Dundee’s new degree in Comic Studies.

Okay, this is going to be a brief post because I’m a bit busy, and I’m going to set out two things you should probably know pretty baldly.

1. Tom Harris and I seem to disagree about everything.

It began when I made some unkind references to Tony Blair and the War on Terror and the War In Iraq and the frankly shameful business of the dodgy dossier, the 45 minute claim, and the UK’s increasingly obvious complicity in torture around the world. It has not greatly changed course since then.

2. I like comics. I did, in fact, study comics a bit at a university.

So I am either biased or in a position to know the benefits of studying comics, take your pick. Incidentally, the course in question was “Aspects of American Culture”, which introduced me to Robert Warshow‘s writing (on movies, anti-communism on the left, McCarthyism, and, yes, comics), which in turn influenced my thinking in The Gone-Away World and Angelmaker and in general enriches my life. The course was part of a Media, Culture, and Ideology paper, the degree was Social and Political Science, the other components of my path through it being Revolutions, Russian 20th Century History, and Global Security. But of course, Mr Harris is right, it wasn’t a proper “university” (see below), it was just some dusty provincial flophouse for the academic dregs, so what do they know about academic or real-world value?

Okay, that off my chest, here goes:

I see absolutely no reason to dispute the value of a Master’s in Comic Studies. The debate about film schools is always thriving within the UK film industry – those who went generally feel it was hugely helpful and those who didn’t can’t understand how they could waste all that time. They have different skill sets and make different films, and that’s all to the good.

The comics industry is hard to break into and a little opaque; one of the functions of degree courses in media industries is to break through that kind of barrier, give people a sense not only of how they need to produce their work but how to get people to look at it, how the industry as a whole functions. In film, for example, it’s not uncommon to meet writers with a strong grip on demographics and studio economics. So a standard movie pitch might not only go:

It’s about this guy who discovers his wife is actually an alien bent on destroying the world, and he loves her so much he decides to help, but in the end she realises she loves him so much she can’t do it and they farm alpacas instead…

But also:

It fills the gap in your slate for the 18-34 urban demographic. If we make it for under £5m you’ll make the budget back on Brazilian rights alone.

I’ll leave discussion of teaching the techniques and necessities of comics writing and drawing etc to others, and move on…

The thing which finally triggered my decision to blog about the spat – and which remains relevant now that Tom Harris has changed his position a little – was this:

Right ho.

Here’s a few things a degree in Batman could teach you:

The conflicted nature of US self-perception relating to written law as against justice; one face of US foreign policy and its origins – and latterly, consequences; aspects of US copyright and IP law; history and consequences of the Great Depression; the myth of the ‘big break’, the lottery, and the notion of Hard Work; the interweaving of the US’ Puritan origins with capitalism and charity; the nature of the American relationship with the gun; the historical rise of Freudianism in US culture; issues of race and gender in the US…

And on and on and on. This is an icon, shaped by every major event in US history since its inception, handled by many writers, editors, artists. Batman isn’t just Bruce Wayne: he’s Uncle Sam on a bad day.

Seriously? I can understand if you don’t want to study that. But taking the idea as a standard of foolishness? No. That, I do not understand.

[John Freeman's piece on this is here. No doubt Mr Harris will respond. Round and round and round we go.]

Wow.

Alan Johnson is angry. He’s outraged. Like Jonathan Evans and some old geezer who studies MI5 and is therefore completely impartial (unlike five senior judges, whose ‘preposterous’ suggestion that the Security Service could be complicit in torture is baseless and wicked and gives succour to Al Qaeda).

[Photo: Downing Street under CC Attribution]

There is no ‘culture of suppression’ in MI5 (I thought keeping secrets was their job, but I was wrong). They rushed – against the wishes of the Americans, who despite releasing all this information in their own country were absolutely determined to keep it from ours – they rushed to assist Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers with evidence that he’d been subjected to cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. The fact that the goverment’s lawyer wrote to the court to ask them not to say any of these things has nothing to do with suppression, and everything to do with the judiciary’s insane crusade on behalf of the enemies of Great Britain.

Yes, it’s all about Them and not Us. We are good, and everything we do by definition is also good, because it is done in support of our goodness. So all this talk about ‘democratic accountability’ and ‘the rule of law’ is just so much hot air spouted by men in dresses who don’t understand the exigencies. Criticism of Us is mana from Heaven for Them, and don’t you forget it.

It’s also not about complicity in torture. MI5 does not condone, collude in, sponsor or solicit torture. No, indeed. The British Government (being good) would not allow it. The fact that the law does not seem to agree with Mr Johnson and Mr Evans’ perception is not relevant.

And what does the law say? Let’s ask the Joint Committee on Human Rights:

The UN Committee Against Torture, on the other hand, appears to have adopted a wider definition of complicity, which includes “tacit consent” and “acquiescence”, and includes constructive as well as actual knowledge that torture was taking place (i.e. it is enough if the party who is alleged to be complicit should have known that it was taking place). The UN Committee also appears less concerned with the requirement that the assistance must have had a substantial effect on the perpetration of the crime of torture itself. So for example, the Committee Against Torture has made clear that the involvement of doctors is to be treated as a form of participation, even if only for the purpose of ensuring that the victim of torture does not die or suffer physical injuries during interrogation.

We know already that it was apparent that Binyam Mohamed was subject to mistreatment during his time in Pakistan. That of itself may constitute complicity, at least as far as I can see. It is apparent that he then disappeared from view when he was rendered to Morocco for really serious, full blown torture, and that our questioning of him continued while he was off the radar. It is not yet demonstrated whether we knew in what circumstances he was being held or that someone was cutting his penis and testicles with a scalpel. It would however be clear to a hedgehog that when the security services of another country disappear someone for interrogation (which is in itself of questionable legality) from a place where that person is deprived of sleep and mistreated, and they then refuse to give details of the conditions under which the subject is being interrogated, certain conclusions at least suggest themselves. Myself, I would not imagine that they’d been taken from Pakistan to a beach resort with nice cocktails. If it were the case – and again, to my untutored eye, every step along this road of discovery seems to take us closer to this conclusion – that we were aware of what was happening in Morocco, that would clearly and unequivocally be complicity in torture. Even if we didn’t know but really should have (or chose not to) that’s apparently enough.

But none of that is relevant because we are good, and Alan Johnson and Jonathan Evans are keen to remind us of that. It’s shameful to ask the question and irresponsible to demand an investigation. Only wimps and liars and terrorist sympathisers would ever do those things, and they’re un-British and should be ashamed.

Only Al Qaeda, thundered the academic bloke who studies MI5, only our enemies will draw any comfort from this.

No, sir. You are in error. There’s one other group, small though it may be, who might draw such comfort from all this being examined by our judges: men who have been tortured with razor blades while we pushed notes under the door.