Gordon's got a hard hat and two pairs of brown trousers, more than the army had when they were sent into Basra.

In the past week the clueless yet relentlessly authoritarian UK government scaled new heights of ineptitude and plumbed new depths of contempt for public sensibilities. Announcing the long-awaited Iraq War enquiry on a timetable that would ensure its publication only after the next election is one thing. Appointing five government/Whitehall stooges to hold said enquiry, at least two of whom were responsible for the policy and strategy which led to Britain’s involvement in the war in the first place is another. Claiming on national radio, as did Blairite Foreign Secretary, ‘banana boy’ Miliband, that ‘every secret service in the world’ thought Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and that ‘if you’re looking for a conspiracy, you won’t find one’ gives a further clue to the ‘outcome’ of the enquiry. Announcing that this epic search for truth would be held in secret on the twisted logic that this would ensure that those questioned would feel more inclined to tell the truth on the precondition that nobody would be held accountable sums up the depths of degradation into which the current government has sunk our ‘democratic’ system. Had enough yet? Well think again, there’s more.

The familiar excuse that the enquiry needed to be held in camera ‘in the interests of national security’ was a spin too far for the men in black glasses and the men in nylon khaki. It is an open secret that the spooks felt hard done by at being blamed for the amateurish and deeply mendacious ‘dodgy dossier,’ lifted from a PhD student’s C grade essay and allegedly sexed up by Alastair Campbell, which Blair brandished as his ultimate casus belli. (Had they been involved, the document would at least have been spellchecked).

Every security service in the world thought this was Yellow Cake Uranium when in fact it was a deadly weapon of my image destruction.

Though Austin Powers (aka John Scarlett) was the source of the Yellow Cake Nigerian uranium nonsense which Bush used as part of his ultimate casus belli, this appears to have been a combination of wishful thinking and routine incompetence, rather than politically-motivated mischief. ‘In the interests of national security,’ we might never know whether the sources and judgment of the UK security services were corrupted (think Mossad) and its advice overridden (think Blair/Campbell) in the haste to rush to war and support the carpet bombing of tens of thousands of civilians and cause an insurgency which took the death toll to more than 100,000, not to mention the turkey shoot of over 22,000 Iraqi soldiers in the first glorious ‘victory week’ of an engagement which has lasted far longer than WW2 and Vietnam.

The British army, justifiably angry at having held their tongues after holding Basra for five years with cheap equipment, clown cars, mail order uniforms and armour that wouldn’t pass muster at a girl guide’s paintball party, then ridiculed by the US for leaving the place in a mess – ie. with lots of Iraqis left alive – also declared themselves off side. With (Sir) John Chilcot, a dab hand with the Persil, cf the Butler Report, at the helm, Professor (Sir) Lawrence Freedman (co-author of Blair’s 1999 Chicago ‘Humanitarian Intervention‘ speech and alleged architect of the government strategy on engagement in Iraq) riding shotgun and three other sockpuppets to make up the numbers, there was little chance of a fair hearing. Faced by a mutiny led by General (Sir) Richard Dannatt and dark, professionally deceitful Oxbridge twats turning against their lords and masters, the government executed a partial U-Turn (which could yet become a full one).

How, or why, did they ever think they could get away with another cover-up? God told them to do it. In today’s Observer, it is alleged – and predictably denied by this Pinocchio government – that Brown was asked by Tony Blair (through Mandelson, one presumes) to hold the enquiry in secret, for fear that he (Blair) would be tried in the court of public opinion. Well, yes he would, should and well might be, except that a more appropriate and less biased place might be the International Criminal Court at the Hague, where the tribunal would not be stacked with Blairite cronies.

Meanwhile, Thus has thought long and hard as to how to drag the truth of the situation out of Blair and his fellow alleged war criminals. Since it was also revealed this week, in the first of a series of leaks designed to soften the impact if and when they are later confirmed, that while Blair had not authorised the use of torture by UK forces or agencies, he had not stood in the way of other countries who chose to use it, we have our answer! Hold the enquiry in Morocco. Transport can be arranged. After a professional application of waterboarding, a spot of Binham Mohamed on the Old Man, electric shock therapy and constant repetitive exposure to loud music – may we suggest ‘Things Can only Get Better? (Thus passim) – we won’t need any high fallutin’ experts to tell us who did what and when. After all, as any Blairite will tell you, torture works. It formed the basis of much of the intelligence gathering behind the War on Terror, after all.

]]> http://thusmagazine.com/2009/06/we-have-ways-of-making-you-talk-mr-blair/feed/ 0 http://thusmagazine.com/2009/03/torture-is-naughty-barbaric-and-illegal-except-when-we-do-it/ http://thusmagazine.com/2009/03/torture-is-naughty-barbaric-and-illegal-except-when-we-do-it/#comments Wed, 18 Mar 2009 16:09:35 +0000 John Kelly http://thusmagazine.com/?p=2546 This week, Britain’s foreign minister 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.

By Timothy Garton Ash

Short memories

The evidence, so far as we have been allowed to see it, suggests four things. First, Binyam Mohamed, a British resident travelling on a doctored British passport, was detained without trial for nearly seven years, at the behest of the US authorities, in prisons in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantanamo 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.

Let's cosh the truth out of him with this yellow cake uranium

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 American 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. To find the treatment of Mohamed over these seven years utterly shocking and shameful, you do not need to believe that he was harmless. Yes, he seems to have been just a pretty mixed-up young guy, led astray by some version of Islamism. So were the London bombers. If we are to take the High Court’s judgment as our gold standard, then we must also note its view that Mohamed was ‘a serious potential threat to the national security of the United Kingdom’.

But that, in the British government’s own repeatedly stated view, does not justify torture. Centuries of common law and our more recently embraced international obligations unite on this: torture is never justified. Never. The strong impression that Britain became complicit in Mohamed’s torture derives particularly from the testimony of a British Security Service (MI5) officer identified only as ‘Witness B’, who interviewed Mohamed – in what Witness B surreally describes as ‘very cordial circumstances’ – in Pakistan some five weeks after his arrest in spring 2002. The High Court finds that he and others in M15, ‘including persons more senior to Witness B’ must have read reports (still kept secret) about the circumstances of Mohamed’s illegal detention and treatment in Pakistan. Whether or not it was Witness B who produced the threatening remark – worthy of that great British playwright of menace, Harold Pinter – that Mohamed would need more sugar in his tea ‘where you’re going’ (Witness B denies it), the High Court finds that MI5 continued to ‘facilitate’ interviews by and on behalf of the US, knowing full well that Mohamed was being interrogated in a third country. Now Article 4.1. of the 1984 UN Convention Against Torture says that every signatory state must ensure that all acts of torture are offences under its criminal law and ‘the same shall apply … to an act by any person which constitutes complicity or participation in torture.’ Did this not amount to complicity? Then there was the British government’s withholding of information that could have enabled Mohamed to argue in his defence, before the American Military Commission, that the confessions he did make were exacted under duress. The High Court is eloquent on this, quoting an English common law judgement from 1783 that ‘a confession forced from the mind by the flattery of hope or by the torture of fear comes in so questionable a shape when it is to be considered as the evidence of guilt, that no credit ought to be given to it; and therefore it is rejected’. The Foreign Secretary (Miliband) argued that Mohamed could not be offered the only available means to this ancient redress because it would threaten national security. Subsequently, he argued that some of this information could not be made public, because the US government had said to do so would endanger British-American intelligence-sharing – that sacred heart of Britain’s alleged Special Relationship with Washington. Then it turned out the Foreign Office had asked the US government to say that. Last October, all the papers from the court hearings, open and closed, were given by the country’s interior minister to the Attorney-General. If she thinks that there might be a case for criminal prosecution against Witness B, or anyone else, she must either start a criminal investigation herself or hand it over to the Director of Public Prosecutions. More than four months later, nothing has happened. Why? Well, perhaps she has just been busy. But there remains, in the British system, this latent conflict of interest which the High Court summarises thus, in its stately prose: ‘the Attorney General is a Minister of the Crown and thus a member of the Executive branch of the state whose officials are alleged to have facilitated cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or torture’. What is more, Witness B has testified on oath that his actions were authorised by ‘senior management’ and deemed proper and appropriate ‘as far as the Security Service was concerned, and, I believe, Government’. The Government, that is, of which the Attorney General is a member. Even if Witness B were prepared to be the fall guy (and it doesn’t sound like it), any serious criminal investigation would have to enquire into the chain of command, which presumably went up through the head of MI5 to the then chair of the Joint Intelligence Committee, John Scarlett, now head of the foreign intelligence service, MI6, and perhaps higher still, to the then prime minister Tony Blair. In these circumstances, and given all that we already know from the High Court, any decision other than to hand this over to the Director of Public Prosecutions will inevitably be interpreted as a political cover-up. Until we have got to the very bottom of this dark well, using the unrestricted searchlight of the law, any lectures that the British government tries to deliver to others on respect for human rights will be dismissed as rank hypocrisy.

A version of this article also appeared in the Guardian.