There are two disturbing aspects to the mounting evidence that the Government was complicit in the torturing of British citizens abroad. One is that the vehemence of FCO denials grow ever louder as the evidence becomes ever more convincing that MI5 colluded in, or at least certainly knew about, the torture or mistreatment of suspects abroad. Whilst the case of Binyam Mohammed is the most clear-cut, it is only one of several. Documents handed over to the parliamentary joint Committee on Human Rights provide evidence that the British security services knew that 11 British or dual nationals detained in Pakistan were subject to torture. They had not physically participated in the torture, but knowing that torture was administratively routine in certain countries they had turned a blind eye to it, even going so far as to supply large numbers of questions to be put to the victims and systematically relying on information knowing it to have been extracted under duress. That leaves the Government with a case to answer, which it is persistently refusing to do under any rigorous cross-examination.

There are three things the Government should do if it wants to come clean on this issue. The Foreign Secretary should appear before the Human Rights Select Committee to answer at length and in detail the questions raised by the Committee and its incisive chairman, Andrew Dismore. It should publish the operational guidelines that over recent years were intended to govern the procedures which MI5 and MI6 officers were rquired to follow on the detention and interrogation of suspects abroad. And the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) should meet in public to cross-examine security officials about the rendition, secret jailing and alleged torture and mistreatment of terror suspects. The latter raises wider issues about the status and relevance of the ISC whose members are chosen by No.10, meet behind closed doors, are serviced by career civil servants from the Cabinet Office, and produce reports submitted to the Prime Minister rather than parliament which can be edited or redacted before publication or not published at all.
The second, even more fundamental, point about getting at the full truth about this matter is that Parliament should not have to ask – in effect ask the Prime Minister – for a public inquiry to be set up. It should set one up on its own account. If the nation is to take Parliament seriously in its central role of holding the Government to account, it is frankly absurd that it requires permission of the Government to set up an inquiry into a murky area of government activity where the Government itself is the defendant under scrutiny.
The Wright Committee which has now been set up, in the backwash from the expenses scandal, to look in depth into parliamentary democratic reform for the first time for a century should make this one of its main recommendations. Whilst the Prime Minister will of course continue to set up public inquiries where he or she thinks fit, Parliament (like its Victorian predecessors) should reserve to itself the right to set up its own public inquiries, which in a number of casesx may well not coincide with the wishes of the Executive.

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