The Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary claim that Britain does not collude in torture.
On Sunday 8th August 09, David Milliband and Alan Johnson put out a joint newspaper article in which they said they couldn't guarantee that some methods used by other governments did not amount to torture. (Our own use of torture against Irish suspects in the Seventies is perhaps another matter); Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty, was able to challenge their laissez faire attitude on the Today Programme, BBC Radio 4:
"The important word is complicity. Now this is a word that comes from the Torture Convention. It was very helpfully unpacked for us by the Joint Committee on Human Rights. Now it referred to things like 'sending questions to a foreign power, knowing that they'll be put to someone under torture', 'sending intelligence that leads to someone's arrest by a foreign power that engages in torture', 'interviewing a suspect quite possibly between torture sessions by that foreign power' - essentially systematic arrangements to receive material that has been harvested in this way... in yesterday's article the Home Secretary and Home Secretary did that thing that interviewees do, which is answer the question that wasn't put to them. So they say, "We cannot eradicate all risk of receiving information from dubious sources". No one asked them to eradicate that risk. People want to know, Have you been sending questions that are then put to people under torture? Etcetera.
...Now this isn't something that I made up. We've had two, high level parliamentary committees reporting within less than a week and to some extent impugning the government's record in this area. We have a number of ongoing court cases and what the government and indeed the security establishment are sadly facing at the moment and have been for some years, is a slow bleed of poisonous revelations, drip by drip, which can't be good for morale and I don't think allow us move on from the darkest moments of the war on terror."
Kim Howells, Labour Chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, House of Commons, responded with his answer to the question: ' Do you believe there is no complicity of that sort?'
"Well, I have to be completely objective about this, and we will look at any evidence that's put before us, and there are court cases pending at the moment, and they go back mainly to a period round 9.11, when there was frantic activity across the world, but I can tell you that we found no evidence that there's been collusion and governments that torture their individuals and - can I add this? Y'know, we can't give a guarantee and no government on earth can give a guarantee that someone who's picked up and held in another country hasn't had their or her human rights abused in some way. No one, not the French, the Swedes, the Spanish, the Germans, it doesn't matter who they are; you cannot guarantee if you haven't held that prisoner that they haven't been deprived of sleep for some hours, that they haven't in some shape or form been frightened or cajoled [blog's emphasis] into giving information. But if we don't have that information from other intelligence agencies, how can you be sure that they aren't jihadists, who are trying to murder citizens on the street, or Irish Republicans who want to blow people to pieces in order to further their cause? You have no way of knowing that."
Mr Howells' naivety is breathtaking. Despite centuries of hard evidence that torture merely forces victims to say anything, absolutely anything, as long as it sounds like the kind of information the tormentors are seeking, just to stop the agony, he continues to profess belief in its efficacy, and in the 'ducking stool' method.
If she floats, she is a witch, and must be burned. If she drowns, that is regrettable. It was an honest mistake. Y'know.
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