Lies, Damned Lies and Intelligence

Watching Question Time last night it was quite clear that Geoff Hoon was lying out of the corners of his mouth about the British government and the torture practiced by the Bush administration.
It has been widely reported in the media this week that the US administration made threats to the British Foreign Office that it may refuse to share intelligence in future if documents revealing US involvement in torture are released into the public domain, and that this position has not changed under Obama.The case - in the High Court again this week - relates to former British resident and Ethiopian national Binyam Mohamed, who was picked up in Pakistan in 2002, rendered to Morocco and Afghanistan’s infamous “Dark Prison”, where it is claimed he was interrogated and horribly tortured and mistreated for two years by or on behalf of the American CIA, apparently with the knowledge and complicity of British intelligence and possibly the British Government, before being transferred to the US military prison camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he has remained ever since. Binyam has been on his latest hunger strike for over a month and his military lawyer reports that he is close to starvation.

Shami Chakrabarti from Liberty who was also on the panel described Hoon's comments as "disgraceful" and asked why Hoon had not asked the new US administration if the intelligence would be harmful to them if released. Hoon's reply was evasive. Even Will Young joined in describing the government's appeal to the court as "despicable". This is the same Hoon who squirmed and wiggled over the reasons for going to war in Iraq, and who assured the British people on many occasions, as Defence Secretary, that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. He is the epitome of a New Labour minister and shows how far morally and intellectually the Labour government has fallen. Hoon was also unable to explain why the argument raised in court by the Foreign Office was different from the statement to parliament by the Foreign Secretary the following day.

Later on one of my favourite politics programmes 'This Week' Andrew Neil blew the pretence of the government's strategy away by revealing that a friend of his who worked in intelligence circles in the US had told him that the release of such information would be of no consequence to the US government. Neil then asked Michael Portillo if that was correct. Portillo, who as Neil pointed out , is a former Defence Secretary, agreed. So the real reason is that the UK government was complicit in this torture and at lease knew of it, and it is even possible that British agents participated. The dark soul of the war on terror and all that the Bush administration did, spreads far into the heart of Whitehall and includes many members of the current government. I can only hope that when international criminal proceedings are started against those who have carried out some of the worst abuses of human rights ever, that Blair and Brown's gang have their place in the dock.