Torture Inc.In The UK

David Milliband's ponderous statement to the Commons on Thursday about the cover up over MI6 collusion in torture is a Nuliebore classic. Deliberately confusing national security with political embarrassment.

Binyan Mohamed, a UK resident, was subject to a new interrogation regime, approved by the US authorities, including continuous sleep deprivation, threats and inducements. Without going into explicit detail, the report states that the treatment was causing “significant mental stress and suffering”. In fact, it appears that Mr Mohamed was an extreme victim of extraordinary rendition. Sent on a secret flight to Morocco, he was subject to torture, including the use of a scalpel to cut his genitals.

In his statement Miliband attempted to justify the government’s position on the basis of protecting intelligence passed on from the US authorities in confidence. The weakness of his position is laid bare in the material revealed on two counts. First, the material redacted does not contain any intelligence. It relates to the abuse of Mr Mohamed’s human rights. Secondly, the government’s position has been undermined by President Barack Obama’s recent declassification of a mass of material about what the White House was getting up to immediately after the Twin Towers attack. Mr Miliband merely drew attention to the grubby under belly of the “special relationship”.

An irony not lost on human rights campaigners is that the medieval torture of this man yielded no useful intelligence whatsoever. This is not surprising. Yvonne Bradley, the experienced US military lawyer assigned to defend him and initially accepting of George Bush’s assurance that the Guantanamo prisoners were “the worst of the worst”, was quickly convinced that this non-Arabic speaking recent convert to Islam could not possibly be a senior al Qaeda operative.

Attorney General Lady Scotland has already asked Scotland Yard to investigate British complicity in torture in this case. Surely now is the time to widen the scope of this investigation into an independent judicial inquiry? Under what instructions were British intelligence agencies working with regard to suspects they knew were being tortured?

On what moral authority can Britain confront Israel or Iran if it turns a blind eye to complicity in torture by its own intelligence agencies?