Guardian UK: If Britain became complicit in torture, we must discover who is to blame

[marmar]

If Britain became complicit in torture, we must discover who is to blame
The only way to answer charges of a political cover-up is to hand this case over to the director of public prosecutions

Timothy Garton Ash
The Guardian, Thursday 12 March 2009


Next week, the foreign secretary will present the Foreign Office's annual report on human rights violations around the world. For anyone who cares about Britain and human rights, it will feel difficult to ask about anything except the British government's own entanglement in a case of torture.

The evidence, so far as we have been allowed to see it, suggests four things. First, Binyam Mohamed, a British resident travelling on a forged British passport, was detained without trial for nearly seven years, at the behest of the US authorities, in prisons in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, and for some of that time he was tortured. Second, British security service officials were directly involved in interrogating Mohamed in Pakistan, and subsequently supplied questions that were passed by the CIA to his Moroccan torturers. Third, only last year British and American officials worked together to delay, if not prevent, documents that pointed to such mistreatment being supplied in a timely fashion to Mohamed's defence lawyers, at a time when the Bush administration was poised to put him on trial before a so-called military commission on charges carrying a possible death sentence. Fourth, the British government is even now dragging its feet about initiating the criminal investigation, overseen by the director of public prosecutions, which would be the only fitting response to such a grave sequence of events and set of documented allegations. So, here's the charge sheet in shorthand summary: American-authorised torture; British complicity; an American-British attempt to withhold evidence; and now the predictable temptation to cover up.

Most of this story emerges not from hearsay or journalistic digging, but from the patient work of British lawyers and judges, scrupulously documented in the copious records and stately prose of the high court. It's not easy bedtime reading, but the authority is unimpeachable and the detail riveting.

Take the four points in turn. I defy anyone to read Binyam Mohamed's account of having his penis repeatedly cut by a Moroccan torturer's scalpel and not feel slightly sick. "Oh, but we only have his word for it," a hard-nosed doubter might say. Yet, even in the publicly available court records, there are clear indications that British and US security operatives had few illusions about the way he was being treated, starting already in Pakistan - and that precisely this is documented more fully in records and testimony still kept secret. .........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/12/torture-guantanamo-human-rights

[opihimoimoi]

1. Oh Oh Heads Gonna ROLL TIME.....

[LynnTheDem]

2. Tony Blair. George W. bUsh.

That's where the torture buck/pound stops.