Torture Lite: Michael Ignatieff’s Problematic Written Record

By Grace-Edward Galabuzi

Controversial Canadian novelist and human rights scholar Michael Ignatieff is one of the Liberal Party's candidates for the 2006 federal election.

In his response to Haroon Siddiqui’s opinion piece in the Toronto Star titled “Ignatieff now in dubious company over torture,” Michael Ignatieff claimed that a cursory research of his writings would dispel the notion that he supported torture.

In his book, The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror, while hedging on the broader theme of torture, Ignatieff sanctions a list of ‘forms of duress’ such as “sleep deprivation, that do not result in harm to mental or physical health, and disinformation that causes stress”, hence the label, torture lite.

Again in the New York Times Magazine, May 2, 2004, he argued that “Permissible duress might include forms of sleep deprivation that do not result in lasting harm to mental health or physical health, together with disinformation and disorientation (like keeping prisoners in hoods) that would produce duress”. Clearly he is on the side of applying ‘acceptable’ forms of torture to extort information from detainees, a practice whose value is at best dubious.

Aside from the fact that this reminds one of the Abu Ghraib pictures showing the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American troops, it is precisely this kind of ‘qualified’ torture (‘torture-lite’) that Louise Arbour, former Supreme Court of Canada Justice and current head of the United Nations Human Rights Commission has rejected in her call for maintaining an ‘absolute ban on torture’ in her opinion piece in the San Diego Union Tribune on December 07, 2005.

Ignatieff’s advocacy for the ‘slippery slope approach to torture’ provides intellectual cover for full fledged Guantanamo Bay or Abu Ghraib style US exercise of torture. It has provoked his human rights colleagues to call him a ‘a virus in the human rights movement’ and has provoked a very vigorous debate between him and many human rights scholars.

An article by Laurie Taylor, professor of sociology at University of London which appeared in the New Humanist, September-October, 2005 outlines this debate in academia. For his part, literary critic Ronald Steel’s review of Ignatieff’s book The Lesser Evil in New York Times Book Review (July 2004) suggested that “Michael Ignatieff tells us how to do terrible things for a righteous cause and come away feeling good about it”.

The signs of trouble surrounding Ignatieff's entry into Canadian electoral politics are not limited to his evolving position on torture. An even more disturbing issue is his position on imperialism. His writings show that he has advocated naked imperialism – American imperialism – even at the expense of Canadian interests! In his 2003 book Empire Lite: Nation-building in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, he establishes what Taylor calls “a sort of rational framework for democratization by force and also for the revision of our understanding of human rights”. Subsequently, he has been accused of giving the American government of George W. Bush ‘the intellectual tools with which to justify his government’s expansionism’ suggesting euphemistically that the US empire’s “Grace Notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known”. This is especially troubling for someone who has been touted as a potential future Canadian foreign minister and even future Prime Minister.

There are clear parallels in both arguments to the concept that the end justifies the means, as articulated by the neo-conservative cabal that has high-jacked US foreign policy during the tenure of George W. Bush. The Project for the New American Century manifesto resonates with Ignatieff’s writing. In the New York Times, January 03, 2003, in an article appropriately titled "The Burden" (as in White man's burden), he had this to say:

It remains a fact - as disagreeable as those left wingers - who regards American imperialism as the root of all evil as it is to the right-wing isolationists - who believe that the world beyond our shores is none of our business - that there are many peoples who owe their freedom to the exercise of American military power...." Further, "...Being an imperial power is more than being the most powerful nation or just the most hated one. It means enforcing such order as there is in the world and doing so in the American interest. It means laying down the rules America wants (on everything from markets to weapons of mass destruction) while exempting itself from other rules (the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change and the International Criminal Court) that go against its interests. It also means carrying out imperial functions in places America has inherited from the failed empires of the 20th Century - Ottoman, British, Soviet". " In the 21st century, America rules alone, struggling to manage the insurgent zones - Palestine and the Northwest frontier of Pakistan, to name but two - that has proved to be the nemeses of empires past.

Finally, this is a human rights professor with a very problematic record not just on torture and imperialism, but also on democracy. He has previously gone around the world advocating transitions to democracy and substantive democratic principles in countries in the Third World and Eastern Europe.

Yet he has no problem participating in a rigged nomination process in Etobicoke-Lakeshore - displacing a racialized woman overnight in as undemocratic a manner as would please the likes of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe (I understand from those close Jean Augustine - the only black MP from Ontario, when over 50% of the Black community lives – that she was going to be the candidate in the riding until the very week she was shoved aside!!).

The nomination process was expedited and then stopped before the very short deadline when another credible candidate showed up with his papers. Ignatief's campaign office was already set up before the nomination meeting!!!

Just imagine what credibility he would have as our Foreign Minister discussing electoral gerrymandering with the Haitian elite, or the military junta in Myanmar or the Ethiopian or Uganda presidents who just changed the term limits in their countries' constitutions to stay in power indefinitely.

Our only hope is that he does not practice what he preaches, making his worrisome record on torture and democracy a non-issue.

Grace-Edward Galabuzi is Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Administration at Toronto’s Ryerson University