Barack Obama has praised Winston Churchill's refusal to torture German spies during World War II as an example of why the United States was right to abandon waterboarding and other methods of torture.
Apr 2009The president said he recently read an article where he learned for the first time that the British wartime prime minister had stoutly refused to use violent interrogation of hundreds of detainees even as "London was being bombed to smithereens".
"Churchill said 'we don't torture' when the British people were being subjected to unimaginable risk and threat," he said at a White House press conference to mark his 100th day in office.
"And the reason was Churchill understood if you start taking short cuts over time that what's corrodes what's best in a people. It corrodes the character of a country." The president's observations on Churchill marked the first time he has offered such praise of any major figure. He was even suspected of hostility to the wartime leader, after he returned a bust of Churchill gifted to George W Bush's Oval Office by Tony Blair.
Amid fears that the special relationship was cooling, it was observed that in his autobiography Mr Obama mentioned that his Kenyan relatives thought his grandfather may have been tortured in during the Mau Mau rebellion during Churchill's second term in Downing Street.
The article he referred to on Atlantic.com referred to the interrogation methods of Colonel Robin "Tin Eye" Stephens, commander of the wartime spy prison and interrogation centre codenamed Camp 020, which were revealed when MI5 papers were declassified in 2005. He submitted prisoners to intense, psychologically tough, all night questioning but wrote that violence was counter-productive as it produced unreliable information.
Mr Obama repeated that he regarded waterboarding, a technique that simulates drowning and was used hundreds of times of individual al-Qaeda suspects as torture.
He added that his decision, made in the first week of his presidency, to ban "enhanced interrogation methods" approved by the Bush administration, and to close secret CIA prisons, would make Americans "stronger and safer over the long term" and deny extremists a vital "recruitment tool".
"What makes us a beacon to the world is holding true to our ideals when it is hard not just when it is easy," said Mr Obama, who two weeks ago released four memos justifying harsh interrogation methods written by Bush lawyers.
He said that the notion that waterboarding supplied useful intelligence was not proven, because conventional interrogation had not been tried.
In a dig at former vice president Dick Cheney, who has said classified documents would show that waterboarding worked, Mr Obama implied he had read the same and other classified material, and none would make him change his decision.
Mr Obama refused to characterise the previous administration's rationale for waterboarading as justifying torture, though he called it a mistake. David Axelrod, senior White House adviser, said afterwards that the president preferred to "look forward rather than back". Mr Obama has been clear that he does not want to CIA agents who carried out dubious interrogations prosecuted.
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