THIS is Britain’s position on torture: We ratified the UN Convention against it in 1988 and we then passed an Act of Parliament giving authority to the investigation and prosecution of torturers no matter where they cowered. But impressive as all this sounds, how precisely has it helped Binyam Mohamed? His doctors have found serious bruising, organ damage, acute injuries and emotional and psychological collapse.
His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, said: “What Binyam has been through should have been left behind in the Middle Ages.” His client is also suffering from malnutrition and stomach problems — which must be the result of a long hunger-strike, a silent protest which might have killed and released him. And the British government is suffering from the discomfort of having to justify the immorality of the actions that keep the global torture industry robust.
Recently Lord Justice Thomas and Justice Lloyd Jones said the UK government had been forced by the US to suppress information on this case, a claim breezily rejected by Foreign Secretary David Miliband.
Yet the case against the government grows. I find that deeply depressing. For the two talented Milibands are, in other ways, good men whose father Ralph, a Polish-Jewish exile, was a left-wing academic with a consuming sense of justice. An opponent of the US Vietnam War, he condemned the “catalog of horrors” perpetrated by the US “in the name of an enormous lie.”
Those lies and horrors are now part of the essential toolkit for an ambitious minister. Power corrodes, flushing away honor and wisdom and, it seems, personal memory too. Barack Obama promised to shut down Guantanamo Bay and he delivered. For that he deserves immense respect. However, this is not the end of the US- and UK-endorsed use of extreme pain to break people in custody. Ever since the fateful attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, and in truth, long before that in covert operations, these two states have outsourced torture to some of the most lawless regimes in the world.
There is no sign yet that Obama means to outlaw renditions, secret abductions by the CIA, or the unrecorded movement of prisoners. The fear is that these clandestine activities will continue. Shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention center is possibly a way to placate protesters and carry on regardless. I hope Obama has more moral sense than that.
The US and UK pay others to do what Saddam Hussein used to do to his adversaries in custody. This facility is procured by, and makes perfect sense to, those who believe the end justifies anything. Just this week Obama met Michael Ignatieff, the leader of the Canadian opposition who wrote “The Lesser Evil,” a book which defended torture when used to protect the interests of the US. Then we wonder why the world accuses the West of perfidy.
This week Human Rights Watch publishes a report alleging that the British state is implicated in the torture of captured Muslims in Pakistan. UK intelligence and Foreign Office officials have questioned the prisoners while they were being processed, says Pakistan’s Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI). Ali Dayan Hasan, who directed this study, claims there was “systemic” cooperation. Some had nails pulled out and others went through much worse.
In his disturbing and clearly evidenced book, “The War on Truth,” Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed traces the unholy games played with terrorists by the US, and through acquiescence by the UK, flirting with them when it suited and then turning against them. Al-Qaeda has been used as an instrument of Western statecraft and for now is the enemy.
Binyam Mohamed’s arrival will hopefully open this can of snakes and our government will be interrogated, though without screws and electrodes.
