The British government has been complicit in the illegal kidnapping and torture of terrorist suspects by the CIA, and has lied repeatedly to cover up its role.
As early as last summer journalists investigating allegations that German citizen Khalid El Masri had been kidnapped by the CIA in Macedonia, flown to a prison ‘many hours away’ and tortured, were uncovering evidence of mysterious US planes landing secretly in Europe, refuelling and flying on. It is now clear that these are ‘torture flights’, carrying a human cargo of suspected terrorists picked up around the globe and smuggled to secret CIA-administered torture camps in Europe and the Middle East. The Guardian has evidence of 210 such landings at British airports since September 2001.
In the words of Dick Marty, of the Council of Europe, ‘There is a great deal of coherent, convergent evidence pointing to the existence of a system of “relocation” or “outsourcing of torture”… Individuals have been abducted, deprived of their liberty and transported to different destinations in Europe, to be handed over to countries in which they have suffered degrading treatment and torture… governments were aware of what was happening’.
This ‘outsourcing’ of torture routinely practised by the CIA goes under the euphemism of ‘extraordinary rendition’.
Lies and moral turpitude
In December, in response to questions in the House of Commons, the government lied through its teeth. The records demanded by journalists and MPs had been lost or destroyed by Whitehall, had never existed or could not be supplied because of ‘disproportionate cost’. Ministers lined up to deny knowledge of such flights. Prime Minister Tony Blair told Charles Kennedy on 7 December: ‘In respect of airports, I do not know what the Right Honourable gentleman is referring to.’ Foreign Minister Jack Straw told the Foreign Affairs Committee on 13 December 2005:
‘Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States…there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition, full stop.’
On 20 January 2006 The New Statesman published the full text of a leaked briefing sent from the Foreign Office to 10 Downing Street on 7 December. It reveals that ministers were aware of secret US interrogation centres and knew that allowing torture flights to use British airports was almost certainly illegal. However, the briefing highlights the moral and legal turpitude of the government’s position by arguing that the government must accept US assurances – on the one hand not to jeopardise its alliance with the US but, moreover, so that Britain can continue to outsource its own terrorist suspects back to countries where torture is routine, such as Egypt and Algeria, on the basis of spurious ‘memoranda of understanding’ [that torture will not be used] which human rights organisations have dismissed as ‘not worth the paper they are written on’.
Torture by any other name
The US is attempting to get around international bans on torture (which it characterises as ‘quaint’) by redefining it as separate from ‘cruel, degrading or unusual punishment’. In Abu Ghraib and other torture centres, US officers oversee and carry out beatings, psychological abuse, sexual abuse, ‘waterboarding’ and other forms of torture with official sanction. Most recently, a US officer was found guilty only of ‘homicidal negligence’ after he murdered an Iraqi detainee by stuffing him headfirst into a sleeping bag, binding him with electrical cable, straddling him and covering his mouth. Apparently, he was not authorised to sit on prisoners. His captain had told him: ‘The gloves are coming off, gentlemen…we want these individuals broken.’
Despite Britain’s long and shameful history of practising torture – most recently in Greece where a senior M16 officer is alleged to have coordinated the torture of Pakistani suspects after the 7 July London bombings – it has, overtly at least, been bound by international treaties. Now the government is attempting to argue that the European Convention on Human Rights, which bans torture or inhuman or degrading treatment, is the product of a past age which needs to be adapted to new circumstances, legitimising what Amnesty International has called ‘a tacit belief that torture can be condoned under certain circumstances’. Only a ruling by the law lords in December prevented the government from allowing secret evidence gathered by torture in third countries to be used in British courts.
Spain and Italy have been forced to act against US torture flights. In Ireland, protests are growing – one protester attacked the planes with an axe. Meanwhile the British government continues to cover up for the US, complicit in what Noam Chomsky has called ‘a war crime as defined by Nuremberg’.
Cat Wiener
FRFI 189 February / March 2006
