THE KEILLOH EFFECT

    
    According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, in the charter for the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, Article I, "For the purposes of this Convention, the term 'torture' means any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions."
   International Humanitarian Law differs somewhat from this definition in not requiring the involvement of a person acting in an official capacity as a condition for an act intended to inflict severe pain or suffering to be defined as torture.
   The ICRC uses the broad term " ill-treatment " to cover both torture and other methods of abuse prohibited by international law, including inhuman, cruel, humiliating, and degrading treatment, outrages upon personal dignity and physical or moral coercion.
    The legal difference between torture and other forms of ill treatment lies in the level of severity of pain or suffering imposed. In addition, torture requires the existence of a specific purpose behind the act – to obtain information, for example.
    Flash back now to September 2003 and the case of Baha Mousa. In a written statement given in British Parliament on May 14,  2008 the Secretary of State for Defense announced that there would be a public inquiry into the death of that man, an Iraqi civilian who died in Iraq. He described that death as a disturbing incident, not only because a man died in the custody of British soldiers but because an investigation by the Royal Military Police and a subsequent Court Martial highlighted further important questions that needed to be answered.
    Baha Mousa, a receptionist at an Iraq hotel, was taken into custody by British soldiers. While in detention, the soldiers placed a hood over his head, after which they beat him to death. His suffered a minimum of ninety-three separate injuries, some or all of which, doctors say, contributed to his death. 
    Charges were brought against seven members of the Queen's Lancashire Regiment. Six of those soldiers were found to be not culpable. Only one of them, Corporal Donald Payne, admitted to inflicting inhumane treatment, although he was cleared of being responsible for manslaughter and perverting the cause of justice in the death of Mousa. Payne was expelled from the Army and jailed for one year.
    Now flash forward to June 2012. One Dr. Derek Keilloh last week appeared before the medical practitioners tribunal service in Manchester, the judicial arm of the General Medical Council, accused of a cover-up over the death of Mousa. 
    Last week the tribunal heard from Ahmed al-Matairi, who described how he and his staff from the Basra hotel he co-owned–including Baha Mousa–were detained and tortured by the seven British soldiers.
    Matairi said he was taken to see Doctor Keilloh after he had undergone days of beatings by soldiers who kicked him in the kidneys, legs and in the location of a hernia. He was in a "bad state" and "between life and death" when he was finally taken to the medical center. Naked from the waist down, he was handcuffed when Keilloh examined him, he said. He claimed the doctor warned soldiers not to hit him any more or he could die. "He just had a look at my hernia, leg, kidney and said to them don't hit me. He is a criminal. He should not be a doctor." He said the doctor's medical center was near where the detainees were being tortured.

     Matairi went on to say that he had been suffering from kidney stones and a small hernia before he was detained but that the soldiers would aim kicks at his kidneys whenever they wanted him to fall to his knees. He said after days of torture his hernia swelled to five or six inches and his leg, below the knee, also swelled up. Additionally, the hotel owner described hearing Baha Mousa's final words. He said he was being kept in the room next door and was being tortured. He heard him say: "I am innocent. I am not a Baathist. My wife died six months ago. My children are going to become orphans. I am going to die."
    Matairi added: "The doctor heard our cries and he didn't do anything. And he was not far from us for three days and he didn't do anything. He should have fulfilled his role as a doctor."
    Mousa died thirty-six hours after first being taken to the detention center in Basra. His injuries included fractured ribs and a broken nose.

    The hearing is expected to last several weeks.

    All of this raises a crucial issue: What is the responsibility of those who, while not a direct party to the abuse of others, are nonetheless aware of it and perhaps complicit in failing to put a stop to it? 

    On a very much related matter, a friend of mine had her paycheck bounce the other day. When she called the owner of the company to complain, he told her that the company had filed bankruptcy and that she would need to work it out with the bankruptcy court, but that since the company had no assets, she was ultimately shit out of luck.

    Well, well, well.

    Personal responsibility, whether it involves British Petroleum, the torture of Iraqis, Kitty Genovese, or the next door neighbor, has gone away. We are all now safe from ever having to worry about any of our actions--or inactions--having consequence. That should be very nice news, except that it's horrifying.

    You don't remember the Catherine Genovese case, the one that has been written about for years and is cited as an example of the Bystander Effect? Oh, now it comes back, yes. In the Kew Gardens section of Queens, thirty-eight people watched from the safety and sterility of their homes as Ms Genovese was attacked three separate times by the same assailant. 

     On her way home from work on the night of March 13, 1964, Kitty got as far as a street light in front of a bookstore before the killer grabbed her. She screamed. Lights went on. Windows slid open.
     Ms Genovese screamed: "Oh, my God, he stabbed me! Please help me! Please help me!"
     From one of the upper windows in the apartment house, a man called down: "Let that girl alone!"
    The assailant looked up at him, shrugged, and walked down Austin Street toward a white sedan parked a short distance away. Genovese got to her feet. Lights went out. The killer returned as Genovese tried to make her way around the side of the building by the parking lot to get to her apartment. The assailant stabbed her again.
    "I'm dying!" she shrieked. "I'm dying!"
    Windows were opened again, and lights went on. The assailant got into his car and drove away. Ms Genovese staggered to her feet. A city bus passed. It was 3:35 A.M.
    The assailant returned. By then, Kitty Genovese had crawled to the back of the building. The killer tried the first door. She wasn't there. At the second door, 82-62 Austin Street, he saw her slumped on the floor at the foot of the stairs. He stabbed her a third time--fatally.

    Thirty-eight people heard and saw this. Some of them turned up the volumes of their TV sets to drown out the noise. No one called for help. No one went outside to assist her. They were busy being scared.

    I'm sure Dr. Keilloh was also scared. He was scared of what would happen to his tidy little military-medical career. he was scared of what the soldiers would think of him, scared of what they might do. He rationalized his behavior, as did the witnesses to the Genovese murder, that someone else would do something and that if no one did, well, it was really not his business. 

    Locking up Dr Keilloh will accomplish nothing. That would just turn the bastard into the same type of right-wing martyr that the soldiers at My Lai became. No, what might be better would be to subject him to an endless recording of the screams of Baha, or to the tears of the family members who are now deprived of their husband and father. 

    Probably the best thing we could do, by way of divine justice, would be to stop called what happened here the Bystander Effect and start calling it the Keilloh Effect. There's something about being forced to remember our history that has a genuine impact on people's behavior--or lack of it.