Food for thought that’s hard to stomach? Breakfast with Joshua Phillips

Coffee and croissants, torture and terror. Not my usual choice of breakfast, but certainly a meal to remember…

At 8am this morning, myself and about twenty others gathered at Jones Day law firm to hear Joshua Phillips speak about his new book, None of Us Were Like This Before.

Joshua Phillips is a journalist who has reported extensively on Asia and the Middle East. In this new book, he brings together investigations and interviews carried out with soldiers and detainees in the Middle East and Afghanistan over the course of the so-called “War on Terror”.

What emerges is a fascinating document about the devastating psychological impact of torture not only on the prisoners who suffer it, but also – and this is the principle subject of Phillips’ study – on the soldiers who commit it.

Phillips’ approach is an unusual one. We’ve all heard about the cruel and perverse torture inflicted on prisoners in the name of “intelligence investigations”. What Phillips talks about is the effect that committing these acts has on the soldiers themselves. And these soldiers, Phillips explains, are really just kids. Not CIA agents or prison guards, but young boys who, fresh into service, were made party to some of the most inhumane and monstrous activities imaginable. And unsurprisingly, they were left traumatised, scarred by what had happened and, in many cases, totally unable to cope. “At one point my phone was like suicide watch”, he told us, referring to the huge volumes of calls he was receiving from ex-soldiers unable to bear the weight of their actions. Some of the soldiers have committed suicide. Many others have been institutionalized. Almost all are suffering from acute PTSD.

Phillips has a wealth of experience of talking to soldiers, and his reflections on why they end up committing these acts of torture are chilling. Intelligence? Yes, sometimes, but more often it’s boredom, sport, or an apparently tried and tested method of “disciplining” prisoners. And there’s a lot of folklore surrounding torture too, he says. Legend has it in the warzones that when it comes to extracting intelligence, torture works.

According to Phillips, the reality is radically different. A tortured prisoner will tell you whatever you want to hear; meanwhile the torture (and its bedfellows, brain damage and memory loss) will be diminishing whatever value this intelligence might once have had. But it’s all ok after all, he reminds us, because, according to another fond piece of folklore, the Americans don’t “do torture.”