The growing evidence that MI5 was involved in the torture of British citizens in the Middle East and elsewhere raises several disturbing issues. It isn’t just the relevations of the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, abhorrent though they are, it’s the light cast on the murky interface between the security services and the British Establishment and, even more broadly, on the power structure that prevails and the morality of the society in Britain today.

First, it reveals the evasiveness of the British authorities in trying to shuffle the embarrassment felt over the Binyam Mohamed revelations out of the public eye and into areas of inquiry that are secret, safe and controllable by them. Gordon Brown sidestepped the call for a wider judicial inquiry on the grounds that the claims should be investigated by the Intelligence and Security Committee. What he neglected to say was that this body is wholly appointed by him, it sits in secret, it reports to him, and he is under no obligation to publish their report (or even if he did publish such a report, he could edit it beforehand in any way he wanted without anyone on the outside being aware of it).
Second, it is perfectly clear that the Government has no wish to look into this case at all if it can get away with it. In October last year the US counsel to Mohamed wrote to the UK Attorney General saying that they held 30,000 documents on the case. Five months on, her office has still not responded to the letter. Again, the Attorny General is an appointee of the Prime Minister, not a Law Officer appointed independently of the Executive, as ought to be the case.
Third, apart from the allegations of torture, Binyam Mohamed also suffered, as have thousands of others, rendition to various US interrogation centres and prisons of some US Arab allies known to practise torture, before being transported to Guantanamo Bay. There remain major questions as to how far the UK has collaborated with US policy under President Bush in the use of this network of CIA ‘black sites’ into which prisoners disappear as ‘ghost detainees’ beyond the legal process and entirely hidden from public view or even knowledge of their existance.
Fourth, this whole episode raises yet again wider questions about Britain’s subordination to US War on Terror extra-legal tactics. John Hutton, the defence secretary, admitted a fortnight ago that in February 2004 British SAS soldiers in Iraq handed over 2 individuals to the US military, who flew them to a prison in Afghanistan. He also made clear that Parliament had been lied to when it was told that the Government had no knowledge of the extraordinary rendition of prisoners from Iraq by UK forces to places likely to involve torture. The 1949 Geneva Convention prohibits deportations of prisoners to any other country, but the MOD claimed that this was “not a Geneva Convention issue at all”!

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