The latest developments on the Torture issue – the speech by MI5 chief Jonathan Evans and then the High Court decision in favour of release of secret US material concerning Binyam Mohamed – are (in their different ways) further important steps towards clarifying how if at all we deal with the problems arising from ‘tainted’ foreign material.

Anticant delivers a fierce analogy:

This egregious performance reminds me of Pooh-Bah in Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Mikado’ who regales his sadistic sovereign’s ear with graphic descriptions of torture and execution and then, when it transpires that the hapless alleged victim was the Mikado’s son, pleads that he in fact wasn’t there, and had merely sought to add “a touch of artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative” . 

If torture is OK, let’s say so forthrightly and use it ourselves unblushingly. If it’s not, let’s do everything we can to stop it, whoever is doing it. What we shouldn’t be doing is to make humbugging prevarications along the lines of “We only practice the highest standards of food hygiene, but if some of our foreign suppliers send us tainted meat we have no option but to feed it to our customers”.

Craig Murray celebrates his birthday:

If you read the Guardian report of the High Court judgement, in any other age a Minister caught behaving as appallingly as Milliband has, would have resigned. I would love to be locked in a room with the little twerp for a couple of hours to teach him about the reliability of intelligence from torture. I would have him confessing to menbership of Al-Qaida before I severed his second testicle…

Which is of course the major point. Binyam Mohammed is an innocent man whom we gave over to torture for no reason. The thousands tortured in Uzbekistan into confessing to Al-Qaida links were almost all innocent. That is just one problem with the "Torture Works" argument put forward by Britain’s highest paid thug Jonathan Evans.

‘Innocent’ is an interesting word to use to describe Binyam Mohamed. According to Craig ‘almost all’ the thousands tortured in Uzbekistan were innocent. How does he sift out the guilty ones?

Here is what the Americans thought Mr Mohamed was up to:

According to the U.S. government’s allegations, Osama bin Laden visited the al Farouq camp "several times" after Mohamed arrived there in the summer of 2001. The terror master "lectured Binyam Mohamed and other trainees about the importance of conducting operations against the United States." Bin Laden explained that "something big is going to happen in the future" and the new recruits should get ready for an impending event.

From al Farouq, Mohamed allegedly received additional training at a "city warfare course" in Kabul and then moved to the front lines in Bagram "to experience fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance." He then returned to Kabul, where the government claims he attended an explosives training camp alongside Richard Reid, the infamous shoe bomber.

Mohamed was then reportedly introduced to top al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. By early 2002, the two were traveling between al Qaeda safehouses. The U.S. government alleges that Mohamed then met Jose Padilla and two other plotters, both of whom are currently detained at Guantánamo, at a madrassa. Zubaydah and another top al Qaeda lieutenant, Abdul Hadi al Iraqi, allegedly directed the four of them "to receive training on building remote-controlled detonation devices for explosives."

At some point, Padilla and Mohamed traveled to a guesthouse in Lahore, Pakistan, where they "reviewed instructions on a computer … on how to make an improvised ‘dirty bomb.’" To the extent that the allegations against Mohamed have gotten any real press, it is this one that has garnered the attention. Media accounts have often highlighted the fact that Padilla and Mohamed were once thought to be plotting a "dirty bomb" attack, but that the allegation was dropped, making it seem as if they were not really planning a strike on American soil.

Indeed, all of the charges against Mohamed were dropped last year at Guantánamo. But this does not mean that he is innocent…

Innocence in this context might mean different things, such as:

  • that the suspect in fact had nothing whatever to do with the terrorist conspiracies concerned but had been wrongly charged
  • that he was known to have been part of a conspiracy, but for some or other reason the case could not go to court successfully
  • that he was known to have been part of a conspiracy, but had been cleared by a court

Anyway, my point is rather this.

That on the one hand we are urged by progressive-thinking people to believe that the UN Human Rights Council vote against Israel this week somehow represents a serious moral position adopted by a majority of honourable countries.

And that on the other hand, if HMG were to accept secret intelligence material from almost any of the countries in the majority, and perhaps any member of the Council, the same progressive-minded people would howl with indignation that we were taking evidence probably tainted by torture in the countries concerned.

Look at the list of countries which voted for that Resolution:

Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djibouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia

From which of those states would secret intelligence drawn from local interrogation of terrorist suspects not be suspected of being extracted by torture or serious brutality (insofar as there is a difference) or otherwise illegitimate ‘pressure’? 

Look at the other countries who abstained or opposed or found it All Too Difficult:

Opposing:  Hungary, Italy, Netherlands, Slovakia, Ukraine, United States of America

Abstaining:  Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Republic of Korea, Slovakia, Uruguay

All Too Difficult:  France (plus UK)

Same question.

So, problem.

Do we close down all secret intelliegnce cooperation in the one area where we all really need it?

And if we do decide to take some risks in that sense by continuing cooperation, how to organise our procedures so that the secret sharing arrangements are not blown open by the oh-so-principled UK courts, risking the flow of inward material drying up and so putting UK lives at stake?

On this one, David Miliband made a clear and strong statement.

That it might be unpopular does not make it wrong.