Britain Right to Expose Torture

The Times, The Times February 11, 2010

Effective opposition to terrorism will sometimes need exceptional measures. Torture cannot be one of them, because it damages the society that practises it as well as those who suffer it. Preventing the public from learning about the use of torture is a violation of liberty. Those ought to be axioms of the struggle against Islamist terrorism. This Government has muddied them.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary, tried to prevent the public disclosure of secret information about the alleged torture of Binyam Mohamed, born in Ethiopia and now resident in the UK. Mr Miliband used an implausibly expansive definition of national security to seek to justify withholding that information. The Court of Appeal ruled yesterday that a seven-paragraph description of Mr Mohamed’s treatment in US custody in secret jails should be made public.

It was a wise judgment. It ought to encourage greater openness about the tactics used by the security services, and greater scepticism about justifications for restraints on publication. Above all, it should highlight the dilemma for democratic societies in combating the forces of nihilism. The struggle against totalitarianism is about ideology as well as force. For free societies to triumph, they must maintain the appearance and hence the reality of due process against those suspected of committing or aiding terrorism.

Mr Mohamed was originally detained in Pakistan in 2002, before being taken to Morocco on suspicion that he had been trained by al-Qaeda. He says that he was tortured in US custody and asked questions posed by MI5. After incarceration at Guantánamo Bay, he was released last year.

Mr Miliband insists that the British Government remained resolute against the practice of torture. His objection to the release of the information was that Britain should maintain the confidentiality of intelligence gained from its allies. Of course, the security services need to maintain secrets in order to interdict terrorists. But there is a trade-off between the State’s duty to protect and the public’s right to know.

The redacted paragraphs that have now been published on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website are not about terrorist plots. They detail the treatment that Mr Mohamed received in 2002 from Pakistani interrogators at the behest of the US. The techniques included shackling Mr Mohamed during interrogation, depriving him of sleep and subjecting him to severe mental stress. As the Lord Chief Justice made plain yesterday, these are not matters of national security. They are about the mistreatment of a suspect.

Terrorist fanatics are not ordinary criminals. They are combatants without a state, possessed — in the phrase of Joseph Conrad — of a frenzied puritanism of ambition. Emergency measures against them will be necessary. But torture cannot be part of the rules of engagement. The intelligence gained under duress would be of doubtful value and immensely costly to the integrity of democratic governments.

President Obama has acknowledged the errors made in US penal policies after 9/11. Mr Miliband has put the British Government outside that understanding. He has done so in the name of a higher value, but in the service of a baser politics. Like the Cold War, the just and necessary struggle against al-Qaeda may last for decades. It must be open to the light of public scrutiny.

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