Poison of Guantanamo must be drawn

GORDON Brown should call Barack Obama and say, “Mr President, our predecessors left us with a great steaming pile of ordure called the war on terror. It is going to blight our works, spoil our reputations and, incidentally, undermine liberty. Let us join now in declaring a giant inquiry into every murky corner of this so-called war and come clean. Let’s do it now.”

Instead the miserable saga unfolds its horrors. This week the UK foreign secretary, David Miliband, was induced by forces of darkness to give the feeblest excuse for stopping the high court in London from disclosing details of the alleged torture of a British resident entombed for four years in Guantanamo Bay. He said that disclosure would do “serious and lasting harm” to the exchange of information with the CIA. In other words it would embarrass the Americans and they might deny intelligence in return. This, Miliband said, was not a threat but “a fact”.

It is simply unbelievable that the CIA, were it to discover that terrorists were about to bomb London, would refuse to pass the information to MI5 (British counter intelligence) out of spite. Besides, the details reluctantly kept secret by the court specifically did not include “intelligence material”, which Miliband said might be jeopardised. They concerned acts by interrogators that do not enjoy immunity and are criminal under international law. On Wednesday night the foreign secretary denied he had been threatened by the Americans and said, “We do not turn a blind eye to torture.” That is exactly what he had done.

This is all part of a terrible mess. The UK home secretary, Jacqui Smith, is being pressed to explain the apparent complicity of British agents in a dreadful case of Pakistani torture including fingernail extraction. The British ministry of defence is also under pressure to explain the use of its airfields for “rendition” flights of suspects to places where they could be covertly tortured. Every time the carpet is lifted, rot appears.

When I was a schoolboy our staple reading was books recounting how our heroic boys resisted lurid violence at the wartime hands of Germans and Japanese. Had you told us that British ministers would one day be standing in the House of Commons and making squirming apologies for similar treatment by “our side”, we would have assumed that an appalled nation would rise up and damn them. Not so.

I accept that the civil rights movement can seem obsessed with torture, in preference to other horrors of war such as bombing, ethnic cleansing or summary execution. Some victims may hype their mistreatment to win sympathy or gain publicity. But torture is a recognised crime, militarily unreliable and dehumanising to its perpetrators. The accumulated evidence of its use in the war on terror is beyond reasonable doubt. It merits not just condemnation, but inquiry and prosecution.

The columnist Bernard Levin once wrote that espionage damaged the brain of all involved in it. Immersed in the Cold War’s convoluted game of bluff and double-bluff, it distanced its practitioners from reality and drove them mad. Dedicated to secrecy, they behaved as if any secret had to be important and anything important had to be secret.

An absolute certainty is that Guantanamo Bay and its offshoots at Bagram in Afghanistan and Abu Ghraib in Iraq will soon offer historians and film-makers a goldmine of the grotesque. Unless the Americans swiftly raze them, every inch will be searched for evidence of monstrous practices, before being turned over to Hollywood, lock, stock and thumbscrew. Brown and Miliband sat round the cabinet table when all this was going on, but they have no need now to taint themselves with Guantanamo, as did Tony Blair with his nonsense about it being just a legal “anomaly”. They could reasonably dismiss it as history, a neoconservative brainstorm which, as with McCarthyism, drove a section of the American establishment up an authoritarian blind alley, before it was dragged back to sanity by the electorate.

On Thursday, Miliband repeated the defence his department put up last year against the prosecution of BAE Systems for corruption in the Saudi arms deal investigation. He again said that a criminal investigation should not proceed if it “risked national security”. The abuse of this phrase, now applied to anything from memoir censorship to parking restrictions, has become a sick joke.

From the 1986 suppression of the book Spycatcher to last year’s protected bank accounts of Saudi playboys, “national security” has regularly been advanced to conceal the incompetence of the intelligence service or protect it from embarrassment. Britain’s involvement in Guantanamo Bay was always tangential and some law officers, such as the then attorney-general, Lord Goldsmith, publicly distanced themselves from it. But the prison was a feature of the hysterical overreaction of American and British governments to 9/11 and has remained so ever since.

The overreaction led to two ongoing wars, the use of political assassination and torture, detention without trial, random arrest in foreign parts and extraordinary rendition. All these have stripped the West of moral integrity in the Muslim world and blighted foreign policy for more than seven years.

For all the protestations of the Obama regime that “the war on terror” is over — echoed by Miliband himself — it is not. It is still being waged from the plains of Helmand to the courts of justice in London. The poison of Guantanamo still courses through ministerial veins. Bad habits die hard.

That poison must be drawn if it is not indefinitely to corrupt western liberty and thus, in the all-too-real phrase, “do the terrorist’s work for him”.

A start could be made by Brown overruling his foreign secretary, standing up to the CIA’s blackmail and freeing British courts to investigate the truth of a sorry chapter in Anglo-American relations.

By Simon Jenkins
—The Guardian, London