Detainee Torture: Pressure for Inquiry Mounts in Britain

The British government is under growing pressure to launch a formal inquiry into detainee torture. On Sunday -- for the second time in a week -- a parliamentary committee demanded the publication of guidelines given to security and intelligence agencies regarding the treatment of detainees abroad.

Pressure for such an investigation has been building for some time. The most widely publicized case concerns Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was detained by the United States government on suspicion of terrorism shortly after 9/11 and spent 6½ years in prison in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Morocco and Guantánamo Bay. According to documents revealed by the high court last month, an MI5 (military intelligence) officer visited Morocco three times during the time Mohamed claims he was secretly interrogated and tortured there by the CIA.


Last week, the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights called for a formal inquiry to investigate allegations that British intelligence and security agencies have been complicit in torture. Also last week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton threatened to cut off intelligence-sharing with the U.K. if it revealed certain portions of Mohamed's interrogation that could directly implicate the CIA in torture.

But things really heated up over the weekend, when the influential Committee on Foreign Affairs pressed the government to explain why crucial documents relating to CIA torture flights that stopped on sovereign British territory were destroyed. At issue is the role of Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory, in the United States' "extraordinary rendition" program. Foreign Secretary David Miliband admitted 18 months ago that two U.S. planes refueled on the Indian Ocean island. The committee now wants a detailed account of the record-keeping and disposal policy regarding flights to the territory and "elsewhere through U.K. airspace."

Then yesterday the Joint Committee on Human Rights called on the British government to take the lead in allowing torture victims to sue foreign governments in U.K. courts (something victims are already doing through courts in Spain).

So far, at least, the British government would appear to be dragging its heels on launching a judicial investigation. On Sunday two senior cabinet ministers -- Alan Johnson and Miliband -- published a letter in The Daily Telegraph in which they reaffirmed Britain's commitment to human rights on its own soil, even while acknowledging that they cannot have the same level of assurance when detainees are held by foreign governments.

Then on Monday, in a very rare move, the head of the British Secret Intelligence Services (MI6), Sir John Scarlett, went on BBC radio to deny that British intelligence services had been compromised by their close relationship with counterparts in the U.S. He insisted that there has "been no torture and no complicity with torture," although he also reminded listeners that his agency must protect the country against terrorism and that all debates need to be understood through that prism.

If all of this sounds familiar to Americans, that's because it is. Ironically, the British government's reluctance to conduct a torture probe comes just as U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder seems poised to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate alleged CIA abuses committed during the interrogation of terrorism suspects. Indeed, even as the Justice Department sought Friday to suppress the release of photographs of detainee abuse, the Los Angeles Times reports that Holder is increasingly predisposed towards a criminal investigation after reading accounts in a still-classified 2004 report by the CIA's inspector general citing extensive problems and abuses in the agency's interrogation program.

It would be ironic for many over here if the United States -- which is widely viewed as having led the U.K. into the war in Iraq -- were to be the first of the two to launch a torture inquiry. But like so many things that have travelled across the Atlantic in recent years -- the credit crunch and swine flu, to name two -- I wouldn't be at all surprised if torture hearings were next.