New U.K. Government Opens Formal Torture Inquiry

May 21, 12:58 PM, 2010

By Scott Horton

How does a newly elected government concerned about civil liberties and the accountability of its predecessor react to credible claims that intelligence operatives were involved in the torture of prisoners? Britain’s new foreign secretary, Conservative William Hague, shows the way. The Guardian:

A judge will investigate claims that British intelligence agencies were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, William Hague, the foreign secretary, said tonight. The move was welcomed by civil liberties campaigners and may put pressure on the Labour leadership candidate and former foreign secretary David Miliband, who was accused by Hague, while in opposition, of having something to hide. Miliband has repeatedly rejected the accusation and broadly indicated that he or his officials may have been misled by foreign intelligence agencies about the degree of British complicity.

Hague’s remarks appear to have caught the Foreign Office by surprise, as no details were yet available on how the inquiry will be conducted, its terms of reference or when it will start work. Hague will come under pressure to ensure the inquiry is public and comprehensive. He first called last year for an independent judicial inquiry into claims that British officials had colluded in the torture of Binyam Mohamed, the former Guantánamo detainee and a UK resident. Mohamed claimed that he was tortured by US forces in Pakistan and Morocco, and that MI5 fed the CIA questions that were used by US forces.

The usual issues will surround the inquiry. Will immunity be offered for testimony? Will the proceedings be open to the public? What judge will be tapped to handle it?

Notwithstanding the Guardian’s suggestion of surprise, this development was widely anticipated. Hague, while serving as shadow secretary, sharply criticized Miliband over his management of the torture issue. In a recent ruling, some of Britain’s most senior judges suggested strongly that they were also highly dissatisfied with the government’s statements on the subject, which they characterized as misleading. It’s clear that the Labour government was engaged in the same sort of dissembling about torture that marked the Bush Administration, using wiggle words with secret meanings. If the truth is now to emerge, it serves the public interest in Britain, just as it would serve the U.S. public interest, for it to emerge from a detached and depoliticized process–so the formal judicial inquiry is the appropriate tool, just as a commission of inquiry would be for the United States.


remainder: http://www.harpers.org/archive/2010/05/hbc-90007087

About time. I have no doubt that governments all over the world are doing horrible things in the name of national security. We need to stop it.