‘I remain concerned that the investigations shouldn’t just focus on the small people and that one agent shouldn’t be the scapegoat for what was a government policy’.
Binyam Mohamed 2009
The release of Binyam Mohamed from Guantanamo Bay concentration camp on 23 February 2009 was a victory for those who have campaigned long and hard for the truth to be known. The British government now finds itself under the spotlight for a criminal policy of collusion with torture and illegal rendition sanctioned at the highest level. Rendition – the extrajudicial kidnapping and transfer of detainees in a shadowy network of CIA-run or approved ‘dark prisons’ across the world – is illegal. For any country to collude with such an operation is also illegal. Torture is internationally abhorred: it contravenes international treaties including the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and British domestic legislation. Collusion with torture, in any form, constitutes a war crime.
British collusion with torture
‘For myself, the worst moment came when I realised in Morocco that the people who were torturing me were receiving questions and material from British intelligence.’ Binyam Mohamed
Binyam Mohamed was tortured in Pakistan in 2002 by the Pakistan intelligence services (ISI) at the behest of the CIA. During this time, he was interrogated by an MI5 officer. Evidence has emerged that other British residents were also ‘softened up’ before MI5 interrogation. For example, Rangzieb Ahmed from Rochdale, questioned by MI5 in August 2006, was subjected to sleep deprivation and had three finger nails extracted. Human Rights Watch has interviewed ISI officers who insist British intelligence officers in Pakistan were fully aware of the treatment of detainees. In the case of Mohamed, the High Court has ruled that MI5’s involvement went ‘far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing’.
MI5 also passed on information and questions concerning Mohamed to the CIA. His Moroccan guards told him ‘Why do you think the Brits sold you out so cheaply?…We have been working with the British and we have photos of people given to us by MI5’. This collusion with CIA torture was replicated in dozens of other cases (see cagedprisoners.com/downloads/ FabricatingTerrorism_ Report.pdf).
The point is that none of this was maverick behaviour by a few rogue British officers, but rather reflected a policy sanctioned at the very top, by government and security and intelligence service lawyers. The MI5 officer who interrogated Binyam Mohamed, identified only as ‘Witness B’, when asked about the treatment of Mohamed, said: ‘I was aware that the general question of interviewing detainees had been discussed at length by security service management legal advisers and government and I acted in this case, as in others, under the strong impression that it was considered to be lawful and proper’.
Labour changes the rules
After the 2001 attacks on the US, new policies were secretly agreed in both Washington and London as part of the ‘war on terror’. In the US, as Cofer Black, director of the CIA’s Counter-terrorism Center, put it, ‘After 9/11, the gloves came off’. Britain’s Tony Blair warned ‘The rules of the game have changed’. New laws were drafted and secret policies formulated which abrogated fundamental and inalienable rights in the name of national security. Out went international treaties on human rights, and ancient entitlements to habeas corpus; in came a brutal imperialist free-for-all where to be a Muslim was de facto to be an ‘enemy combatant’ on the new global battlefield of the ‘war on terror’, stripped of all legal or human rights. In the US, this led to the legalisation of torture, arbitrary detention, and international kidnapping. Britain enthusiastically followed suit. And thus, as the United Nations found in March 2009, Britain
? co-operated with the US rendition programme to places where detainees were likely to be tortured
? sent British intelligence officers to interview detainees held incommunicado in Pakistan in ‘so-called safe houses where they were being tortured’
? sent interrogators to Guantanamo in an example of what ‘can reasonably be understood as implicitly condoning torture and ill-treatment’.
Meanwhile, in Britain itself it created what Reprieve has described as ‘Guantanamo in our own back yard’. In 2001, the Kafkaesque ‘Anti-terrorism Crime and Security Act’ allowed the Home Secretary to designate any foreign national as an international terrorist who could be held indefinitely on the basis of secret evidence – some of it extracted under torture – unseen even by the detainee’s lawyer. It was, essentially, an updated form of the internment practised by Britain in its war in the north of Ireland, a point emphasised by human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, who has likened the treatment of the Muslim community in the ‘war on terror’ to that of the Irish community in the 1970s – ‘internment, “shoot to kill”, the use of torture… brutally obtained false confessions and fabricated evidence’.When this arbitrary detention was declared illegal by the House of Lords, it was replaced with ‘control orders’, essentially a form of house arrest. Others remain detained under immigration laws facing possible deportation on ‘security grounds’, including to countries that practise torture, again on shadowy evidence which they may neither see nor challenge.
Clearly, the British thought they would never be held to account for their crimes. But the case of Binyam Mohamed has changed all that. That is why, even after Mohamed’s release, Foreign Secretary David Miliband continued to lie to prevent the publication of 42 documents crucial to proving Mohamed’s innocence. It seems highly likely that these provide evidence that implicates the whole war-mongering Labour Cabinet of 2001, as well as the present government, rendering them liable to prosecution. No wonder both the Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary Jacqui Smith have refused to appear before Parliament’s human rights committee to answer questions relating to British collusion in torture. No wonder, despite the head of steam building up in and outside parliament demanding accountability, the government continues to squirm, preferring to leave any ‘review’ in the safe hands of the Intelligence and Security Committee – chaired by former Labour Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells, responsible for counter-terrorism during much of the time abuses were taking place. The Attorney General is considering possible criminal prosecutions, and some material has been passed to the Metropolitan Police – hardly a neutral arbiter – but, as Mohamed himself has made clear, the prosecution of a few operatives will let the government off the hook: ‘It’s very important that we get to the truth, for everyone in the future.’ Only an independent judicial inquiry can determine, in the words of Reprieve, ‘whether the government has been involved in the systemic rendition and abuse of prisoners’.
This vicious, lying Labour government must be held to account for what it is – a bunch of war criminals, prepared to sanction torture and kidnapping in the name of a fictional, self-serving ‘war on terror’. When war criminal Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973, satirist Tom Lehrer gave up performing because ‘It was at that moment that satire died. There was nothing more to say’. What then would he have made of the Foreign Office’s celebration of the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in December, where David Miliband presented a human rights award?
Cat Alison
FRFI 208 April / May 2009
