UK: complicity in torture; torturers confirm

[Penta]

It's getting ever harder for them to wriggle out.

Complicity in torture: Looking the other way

Editorial
The Guardian, Wednesday 25 November 2009

Allegations about Britain's role in the torture of its own citizens in Pakistan are not new. They have been made persuasively by our own investigative reporting. What is new in the report published yesterday by Human Rights Watch is the corroboration it obtained from the torturers themselves. Ali Dayan Hasan, HRW's senior south Asia researcher, found sources in Inter-Services Intelligence, the military-controlled spy agency in Pakistan, and the Intelligence Bureau, a civilian-controlled one, to admit they tortured five British citizens at the behest, and with the full knowledge, of British intelligence.

The sources said that Salahuddin Amin's account of his detention, torture and meetings with UK and US intelligence officers was "essentially accurate". Amin, from Edgware in London, was later convicted of plotting attacks against a nightclub and other sites. The Pakistanis explained that Amin's was a high-pressure case, and that both the UK and US governments were "perfectly aware that we were using all means possible to extract information from him and were grateful that we were doing so". Zeeshan Siddiqui, from Hounslow, London, was arrested in Peshawar. By the time he appeared before a Pakistani court he was in such a traumatised state that the judge, not normally squeamish about interrogation techniques, ordered that he be taken to hospital. Up to that point, Siddiqui had been interviewed six times by British agents.

Confronted by specific claims, the government responds with a generic denial. It says it does not condone torture. But the question it refuses to answer is whether it was complicit in the mistreatment of named individuals. It refuses, too, to publish the guidelines under which British agents operated. It has promised to publish new ones, but has yet to do so. By stonewalling and cloaking legal proceedings in secrecy, the government hopes these claims will expire, rather like Rashid Rauf, another of the torture victims, has.

But these allegations won't go away. Britain is bound by the convention on torture, which is incorporated into domestic law, and anyone could seek a judicial review. That is why an independent inquiry should be established to discover what happened, who knew about it and who sanctioned it. The moral case for an inquiry is even stronger than the legal one. With what authority can Britain confront Afghan warlords or Israeli generals when it turns a blind eye to its own complicity in human rights abuse? And what more effective recruiter can there be for further attacks against civilian targets in Britain than the methods used to discover the plotters of current ones?

More details:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009 ... le-torture
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009 ... in-torture
The HRW report, Cruel Britannia: British Complicity in the Torture and Ill-treatment of Terror Suspects in Pakistan
http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/ ... 9web_0.pdf

[coldharvest]

are you not aware that any government will torture and kill anyone it feels threatened by?

The problem isn't with the self-serving, lying dim-wits but with us when we abrogated our responsibility.

[Penta]

are you not aware that any government will torture and kill anyone it feels threatened by?

The problem isn't with the self-serving, lying dim-wits but with us when we abrogated our responsibility.

D'you think we abrogated our responsibility once and for all? Don't we have a continuing responsibility to hold them to account and to try to prevent such horrors happening again?

[coldharvest]

are you not aware that any government will torture and kill anyone it feels threatened by?

The problem isn't with the self-serving, lying dim-wits but with us when we abrogated our responsibility.

D'you think we abrogated our responsibility once and for all? Don't we have a continuing responsibility to hold them to account and to try to prevent such horrors happening again?

gone forever unless they're seized back

[Penta]

You favour revolution over democratic accountability? Who would've guessed? Aren't I supposed to be the revolutionary commie c*** here?