Govt urges Turnbull to reject torture

The federal government wants Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull to repudiate
comments by a Liberal backbencher who said it was acceptable to torture terror
detainees under certain circumstances.
Attorney-General Robert McClelland said comments by Queensland Liberal MP Michael
Johnson were inappropriate and entirely inconsistent with the views of a humane and
civilised society.
Mr McClelland said nothing justified torture or its use by any nation.
"Torture compromises a nation's moral leadership and jeopardises the capacity to
combat terrorism and counter extremism," he said.
"Mr Turnbull should confirm that the views expressed by Mr Johnson do not reflect
the policies of the coalition."
The row follows release in the United States of heavily censored CIA documents that
showed interrogators threatened to kill the children of alleged September 11
mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and rape the mother of another detainee and used
other forms of intimidation to extract information from al-Qaeda detainees held
overseas.
Mr Johnson, a former barrister, said this was a difficult issue.
"I think that there is a very limited place for torture and, certainly where that
torture takes place, it must be done in an appropriate way, and in an appropriate
context," he said on Sky News, adding that it really all depended on how torture was
defined.
That prompted an immediate response from fellow panellist Labor MP Mark Dreyfus,
another former lawyer.
"I think we need to resolutely say that there is no place for torture," he said.
Mr Johnson gained some support from former opposition leader Brendan Nelson, who
said it depended on how torture was defined.
"We live in a liberal, humane and modern society. I don't think that we should
generally countenance what we would consider to be torture and the brutal abuse of
other people, irrespective of what we think might be the heinous crimes that have or
might possible commit," Dr Nelson told Sky News.
But he said this generation was facing a struggle against resurgent totalitarianism,
predominantly by Islamic extremists whose adherents murdered 88 Australians in Bali
in 2002 and 3,000 mostly Americans on September 11, 2001.
"I just say to those people in this country and in other places in the world who
want to sit back and comfortably tut-tut and express certain views about the use of
certain interrogation techniques to remember that we are dealing with people who in
many cases live by the most heinous standards if any," he said.
"We have to be prepared to stand up to them."
Comment was being sought from Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull and shadow
attorney-general George Brandis.