British Arab Lawyers’ Association

President Obama’s decisions this week to retain important elements of the Bush-era system for trying terrorism suspects and to block the release of pictures showing abuse of American-held prisoners abroad are the most graphic examples yet of how he has backtracked, in substantial if often nuanced ways, from the approach to national security that he preached as a candidate, and even from his first days in the Oval Office.

When Bush administration lawyers wrote their memos authorizing extreme interrogation tactics at Guantanamo, they had to conjure up horrible images: Prisoners gagging and sputtering as their interrogators reproduced the sensation of drowning. Human heads slammed repeatedly into walls. Insect-phobic prisoners cowering in fear in 8-by-10-foot cages.

The world is watching as America attempts to come to terms with the abuse it unleashed in the aftermath of 9/11 and trying to digest the full implications of last week’s extraordinary events. With a wide-ranging Spanish criminal investigation into torture at Guantánamo threatening to embarrass the US, Barack Obama decided to declassify legal memos sent under the Bush administration in the hope the country would move on. The opposite has happened. Ever more documents set out in meticulous detail the full extent of the cruelty: who was abused by whom, how they did it and what was done. The truth has been revealed in stark detail, from the number of times waterboarding was used to the legal deliberations that led to it. By Tuesday, President Obama had raised the possibility of US war crimes trials and far-reaching inquiries, developments that were unthinkable a month ago.

It is Day 6, between 10.00 and 11.00 in the hectic schedule of the television series 24, and a normal day at work for Jack Bauer of the Counter Terrorism Unit. “People in this country are dying, and I need some information. Now are you are going to give it to me, or do I have to start hurting you?” Inevitably, he does. A few lurid torture scenes later and the terrorist confesses, the civilised world is saved for another hour or so, and Jack, played by Kiefer Sutherland, is hurtling towards his next violent confrontation with the forces of evil.

This is the central plot of 24, in many respects the only plot of 24, a brilliantly constructed, wildly popular, strikingly timely series based on a single premise that also happens to be untrue. 24 is fiction, and so is the notion that torture produces results.

As the torture debate rages in the US, the only defenders of extreme interrogation methods are those who have been involved in authorising them, and they rely exclusively on the Bauer defence: pain and fear are effective tools for extracting information, and therefore necessary.

Leon Panetta, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, has been asked by lawyers of one Guantánamo Bay detainee not to dismantle the secret prisons used to interrogate suspected terrorists. The counsel for Abd al-Rahim Hussain Mohammed al-Nashiri argued in a letter to Panetta dated April 13 that the secret facilities should be preserved “ until such time as we have an adequate opportunity to document” the undisclosed locations where al-Nashiri was confined and tortured. The CIA has admitted that al-Nashiri, who is accused of plotting the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, was subjected to waterboarding while in CIA custody. But because videotapes depicting his torture have already been destroyed by the agency, al-Nashiri’s attorneys believe the only remaining relevant evidence may exist at the three secret sites where he was held until being transferred to Guantánamo in September 2006. Panetta announced on April 9, 2009, that the CIA would “decommission” the CIA secret facilities, but he did not explain the details of what that means.

Barack Obama today released four top secret memos that allowed the CIA under the Bush administration to torture al-Qaida and other suspects held at Guantánamo and secret detention centres round the world.

But, in an accompanying statement, Obama ruled out prosecutions against those who had been involved. It is a “time for reflection, not retribution,” he said.

MI5 and MI6 are facing claims that they systematically colluded in the torture of 29 terrorism suspects during interrogation in foreign prisons, it can be disclosed.

A campaign group representing prisoners detained for terrorism has compiled reports from a large number of detainees and former detainees who claim that the security and intelligence services were aware of their torture and mistreatment and did nothing to stop it.

As much as it needs to happen, we never expected President Obama to immediately reverse every one of President George W. Bush’s misguided and dangerous policies on terrorism, prisoners, the rule of law and government secrecy. Fixing this calamitous mess will take time and care — and Mr. Obama has taken important steps in that direction.

But we did not expect that Mr. Obama, who addressed these issues with such clarity during his campaign, would be sending such confused and mixed signals from the White House. Some of what the public has heard from the Obama administration on issues like state secrets and detainees sounds a bit too close for comfort to the Bush team’s benighted ideas.

CACI International Inc., the provider of intelligence-gathering services for the U.S. government, must face a lawsuit by four former detainees who say they were tortured at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee in Alexandria, Virginia, denied the company’s motion to dismiss the detainees’ claims, which allege violations of U.S. law including torture, war crimes and civil conspiracy.

THE ALLEGATIONS are familiar, yet some of the details are sickeningly new. Senior al-Qaeda prisoners held in secret CIA prisons were made to stand for days in painful positions and deprived of solid food for just as long. Interrogators wrapped suspects in plastic, doused them with cold water and slammed them headlong into walls. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was allegedly shackled with his arms above his head for days at a time, leaving lasting scars.