Beyond the easy targets — the hated ID card scheme, for example — the new government has reacted well to two early tests of its promise to tackle Labour’s record on terrorism. This was a significant target for the Liberal Democrats (who actively opposed the use of secret evidence and control orders, and called for an inquiry into British complicity in torture at their conference last autumn), and this latter topic was also a personal obsession of William Hague’s, even if the party as a whole — with a few other notable exceptions (David Davis and Andrew Tyrie, for example, and Baroness Neville-Jones in the Lords) — supported Labour’s domestic anti-terror agenda rather enthusiastically.

The first test: not overreacting to a difficult decision regarding the deportation of two terror suspects

On Tuesday, the government passed its first test, responding with admirable restraint to the thorny problem of a judge refusing to allow the deportation of two Pakistani terror suspects, because they face the risk of torture in Pakistan.

On the campaign trail, David Cameron had made repealing the Human Rights Act one of his major manifesto pledges (and replacing it with a BNP-sounding British Bill of Rights), but when every misguided xenophobe with access to a newspaper column (or a comments page) began wailing about repealing the HRA immediately, the government refused to be drawn.

Home Secretary Theresa May promised a commission to investigate the HRA, while Nick Clegg warned that the Act was “an absolute constitutional cornerstone” and a “fundamental guarantor of rights to the British citizen,” adding, bluntly, “Any government would tamper with it at its peril.” Crucially, however, the government did not threaten to appeal the decision, seemed content to keep the men in question under surveillance, and no doubt quietly accepted that bashing the HRA as an election tool was not the same as having to deal with the real issues.

These, to be clear, are that the legally binding European Convention on Human Rights (PDF) and the UN Convention Against Torture are the documents that prohibit any involvement whatsoever with torture (including sending foreign nationals back to countries where they face the risk of torture) and the HRA (which largely attempted, with some success, to keep ECHR issues in-house rather than having cases perpetually being referred to Strasbourg) is not to blame.

As a result, although we can no doubt expect the government to attempt to follow Labour’s dubious policy of establishing “memoranda of understanding” with human rights-abusing regimes (which purport to guarantee the humane treatment of those returned, even though that is scarcely credible), we will also, hopefully, see real movement (as signalled on Sunday) regarding putting terror suspects on trial, by allowing the use of intercept evidence in regular courts.

This is what numerous legal experts have been advising for years (PDF), and it is clearly time that we joined the rest of the world in finding a way to do this while protecting intelligence agents and sources, rather than continuing to rely on the use of secret evidence, on special advocates who represent the accused in closed sessions, but are unable to tell their clients anything that they have heard, and on the whims of judges in a special terror court.

The second test: a judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture

On Thursday, the government passed its second test, when William Hague, evidently preempting attempts by FCO and intelligence officials to cajole him into silence, announced that he was ordering a judicial inquiry into British complicity in torture and rendition since September 11, 2001. As the Guardian explained, his remarks “appear to have caught the Foreign Office by surprise, as no details were yet available on how the inquiry will be conducted, its terms of reference or when it will start work.” In a follow-up article, also in the Guardian, Ian Cobain laid out what might be hoped for from the inquiry. “It is expected to expose not only details of the activities of the security and intelligence officials alleged to have colluded in torture since 9/11,” he wrote, “but also the identities of the senior figures in government who authorised those activities.”

As was revealed last June, any detailed inquiry will be required to follow a chain to the very top of government, because, as the Guardian explained at the time, Tony Blair “was aware of the existence of a secret interrogation policy which effectively led to British citizens, and others, being ­tortured during counter-terrorism investigations.”

The Guardian added that Britain’s post-9/11 policy “offered ­guidance to MI5 and MI6 officers ­questioning detainees in Afghanistan whom they knew were being mistreated by the US military,” providing intelligence agents with written instructions that they could not “be seen to condone” torture and must not “engage in any activity yourself that involves inhumane or degrading treatment of prisoners,” although “they were also told they were not under any obligation to intervene to prevent detainees from being mistreated.” As stated in the policy, “Given that they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this.”

The Guardian proceeded to explain that the policy, which was “set out in written instructions sent to MI5 and MI6 officers in January 2002,” also informed them that they “might consider complaining to US officials about the mistreatment of detainees ‘if circumstances allow,’” and noted that Tony Blair had “indicated his awareness of the existence of the policy” in 2004, shortly after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke.

The exact form the inquiry will take has not yet been established. William Hague stated only, “We will be setting out in the not-too-distant future what we are going to do about allegations that have been made into complicity in torture. We will make a full announcement that we are working on now. We want a judge-led inquiry.” It is, for example, not known how much of the evidence will be presented publicly. The Daily Mail suggested that “Much of the evidence will be taken behind closed doors and it is is not clear whether a full report will be published — though a summary is expected to be made public.”

However, even with these limitations, an inquiry that focuses, as anticipated, on cases including that of Binyam Mohamed would be extraordinary, given the extent to which the Labour government tried to hide its knowledge of the British resident’s torture in Pakistan, as well as the persistent denials by senior officials, and by the heads of MI5 and MI6, that any collusion in torture took place.

Set against this are the grave concerns and criticism expressed by two High Court judges, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr. Justice Lloyd Jones, who chastised the government for complicity in “wrongdoing” after a judicial review in August 2008, and then spent 18 months arguing that the public had the right to know what was contained in 42 documents sent to the British by their counterparts in US intelligence, and the criticism levelled at MI5 in February this year by Lord Neuberger, the Master of the Rolls, in a Court of Appeal hearing that finally led to the release of a summary of those documents. On that occasion, Lord Neuberger accused MI5 of having “deliberately misled parliament.”

There is much more to Binyam Mohamed’s case alone, of course, especially regarding the extent to which the government knew about his imprisonment for 18 months in Morocco — and, as has been alleged, sent both a spy and an informer to talk to him — as well as British complicity in the rendition and torture of other men who ended up in Guantanamo,  including Shaker Aamer, the British resident who is still held, and Bisher al-Rawi and Jamil El-Banna, who were seized by the CIA in the Gambia on a business trip, after an exchange of intelligence between the US and the UK.

There are also many other cases, primarily in Pakistan, but also in other countries, including Bangladesh, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, that have surfaced over the last few years, in which the torture of British citizens appears to have been very deliberately sub-contracted to foreign torturers. Ian Cobain exposed many of these stories for the first time, I have also discussed them (see, for example, here), and they have also been examined by Human Rights Watch and by Cageprisoners, in a report, “Fabricating Terrorism II” (PDF) that was published in April 2009.

Another champion of accountability, David Davis MP, played a major role in exposing British complicity in torture, when, last July, he used the protection of parliamentary privilege to tell the House of Commons how, in 2006, the government and the security services allowed Rangzieb Ahmed, a British citizen, to travel to Pakistan, where they “suggested” to the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI), Pakistan’s most notorious intelligence agency, that he should be arrested. As he explained, Pakistani intelligence would have been “aware that ‘suggesting’ arrest was equivalent to ‘suggesting’ torture.” Ahmed was later returned to the UK to face a trial, at which evidence of his torture — including having three of his fingernails ripped out — was concealed, and Davis was not only appalled by this particular cover-up, but also told the House, bluntly, “I cannot imagine a more obvious case of the outsourcing of torture.”

For now, those of us who have been calling for an inquiry can only hope that its revelations will not be drowned in the secrecy that was such a hallmark of the Labour government, and that, as Philippe Sands urged yesterday, it will be “deep and broad and as open as possible.” After eight years of largely hidden complicity in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror,” and the recent and compelling evidence of Britain’s own policy of outsourcing torture, we need answers, and we need them to be both frank and clear.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK), my definitive Guantánamo habeas list, and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

Cross-posted on The Public Record, Eurasia Review and Uruknet.

The men in question — Abid Naseer and Ahmad Faraz Khan — were seized in the north west of England last April, as part of “Operation Pathway,” an operation that was brought forward after Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, the head of Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command, was photographed in Downing Street carrying classified documents relating to the operation. Quick resigned soon after.

Naseer and Khan were seized with ten other men (eight of whom were also Pakistani students), and soon became known as the “North West 10,” after the government held the Pakistani students for two weeks, on the basis that they were planning a bomb attack on targets in Manchester. They were then released without charge, but were immediately rearrested and told that they were to be deported.

After several months in prison, all but two of the men left the UK voluntarily, although they maintained that they were innocent, and that their reputations had been ruined. Naseer and Khan, however, chose to stay, and today, in a ruling that pitted Britain’s commitment not to deport foreign nationals to countries where they face the risk of torture against innovative measures relating to the proposed deportation of terror suspects, which, over the last eight years, largely united Labour and the Tories, Mr. Justice Mitting declared that, although he was “satisfied that Naseer was an al-Qaeda operative who posed and still poses a serious threat to the national security of the UK and that … it is conducive to the public good that he should be deported,” he could not allow his deportation because “the issue of safety on return” made it legally impossible to deport him. That “issue,” essentially, is Article 3.1 of the UN Convention Against Torture, to which the UK is a signatory, which stipulates that “No State Party shall expel, return (‘refouler’) or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture.”

Without a trace of irony, which could be regarded as unusual given recent allegations of British complicity in the torture of British nationals in Pakistan, Mr. Justice Mitting also explained that “there is a long and well-documented history of disappearances, illegal detention and torture” in Pakistan.

He added that Ahmad Faraz Khan could “safely be taken to have been willing to participate” in Abid Naseer’s plans, but granted his appeal on the same basis. He also granted an appeal against exclusion from the UK that was lodged by a third man, Shoaib Khan, who had returned to Pakistan (which means that he can now apply to return to the UK), but refused the appeals of two other returnees, Abdul Wahab Khan and Tariq Ur Rehman.

Quite what the government will do now is as yet unknown. The new home secretary, Theresa May, wasted no time in announcing, “We are disappointed that the court has ruled that Abid Naseer and Ahmad Faraz Khan should not be deported to Pakistan, which we were seeking on national security grounds. As the court agreed, they are a security risk to the UK. We are now taking all possible measures to ensure they do not engage in terrorist activity.”

As the Times reported, the men are currently being held at immigration removal centres, “but are expected to be released later today.” The question, therefore, is whether the Times is also correct to suggest that “It is likely that both men will be put on control orders under which their movements, access to telephones and bank accounts can be restricted” — and whether, if this is the case, it will prove acceptable to Liberal Democrats in the coalition government, who voted en masse against the renewal of the control order regime just two month ago.

Just as important, however, is the question of whether Naseer and Khan are actually a threat to anyone. As the Guardian explained, “The suspicions over the group were founded on the belief that Naseer, a computing student at John Moores University in Liverpool, had links with al-Qaeda, and that emails he sent, in which he mentioned a nikkah, or Muslim marriage contract, were a signal that an attack was imminent.” In addition, Khan came under suspicion because he had taken photos of buildings in Manchester city centre. However, Naseer has always maintained that the emails did not contain coded messages at all, and Khan has stated that he took the photographs because of his interest in architecture. Moreover, investigations into the case have done nothing to suggest that there was an actual plot at all.

After a thorough investigation, Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, the government’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, was obliged to concede that none of the arrests had been made “on a full evidential foundation,” and that “the authorities had no specific information as to where the suspected terrorist event was to occur, nor any precise knowledge as to its nature” (PDF). He added that some of the men had essentially been arrested through guilt by association, but attempted to justify the operation by stating that the police were “probably right” to go ahead with it.

Lord Carlile can hardly be judged to have presented a compelling case for “Operation Pathway,” and before there is a right-wing stampede to condemn what former US Vice President Dick Cheney and his close advisers would no doubt have referred to as our “quaint” adherence to the UN Convention Against Torture, it should be noted that those calling for us to discrard our international treaty obligations – essentially by withdrawing from the Convention — should first ask why they are prepared to trust implicitly any information presented by the intelligence services and analyzed by a solitary judge in a secretive court, and not to have its merits debated in an open court.

The key to this apparent problem is to allow the use of intercept evidence in court. Outside of Britain’s particular myopia on this issue, the fact is that most of the world has taken this useful step, and there have been eight reports over the last 14 years in the UK on this very subject, including one by Sir John Chilcot. Moreover, suitable safeguards for protecting sensitive material and sources have also been proposed for many years, and in painstaking detail, by reputable organizations including JUSTICE, the all-party law reform and human rights organization (PDF).

Instead, however, the UK persists in defending a ludicrous and largely improvised legal system, dreamt up after 9/11 and reliant on the presumption of accuracy regarding secret evidence and a demeaning submission on the part of SIAC whenever the words “national security” are uttered, which only whips up xenophobic, Islamophobic and racist sentiment through fearmongering and innuendo, as can be seen from the vile comments below the Times article today.

I was pleased to notice that yesterday the Guardian reported that the government “will attempt to make intercept evidence admissible in court.” Afua Hirsch’s article also noted that “Officials are already looking into reversing the ban, after both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats supported a change in the law while in opposition.” A Home Office spokesperson explained, “The government supports the principle of using intercept as evidence in criminal proceedings. This is a complex area and the government will now consider how to build on the work of the privy council committee to bring about a workable solution.”

It is to be hoped, therefore, that the government moves fast. As Matthew Ryder QC, a barrister at Matrix chambers, explained, “Abolishing the rule about intercept [evidence] underpins the rhetoric of both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats about control orders and secret evidence. What the government does now will be a serious indicator of whether their views on civil liberties are going to be different, or whether they will accede to security service interests in the same way that Labour did.” Acknowledging that there are “practical problems, which are real,” another senior criminal barrister told the Guardian that intercept evidence “ought to be made admissible,” and that the problems “will have to be confronted and solved, as they are in other countries.”

In the meantime, however, the only winner in the case of the North West 10 appears to be Mr. Justice Mitting, who seems to have backed the government into a corner that, curiously enough, involves “acced[ing] to security service interests in the same way that Labour did.” Were I prone to conspiratorial thoughts, I’d be tempted to suggest that today’s outcome conveniently allows SIAC’s undercover work to continue — but that, surely, is not possible, is it?

Watch this space for further developments.

POSTSCRIPT 9 pm: The BBC reports that the government’s kneejerk response is to set up a Commission to review the Human Rights Act, which the Tories want to scrap, ludicrously (and it’s a plan that is ferociously opposed by the Lib Dems). Moreover, it’s all a smokescreen. At the heart of all this is the UN Convention Against Torture, and I don’t foresee Ministers trying to claim that we should opt out of that.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed (and I can also be found on Facebook and Twitter). Also see my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, updated in January 2010, details about the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (co-directed by Polly Nash and Andy Worthington, and currently on tour in the UK), and, if you appreciate my work, feel free to make a donation.

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? and URGENT APPEAL on British terror laws: Get your MP to support Diane Abbott’s Early Day Motion on the use of secret evidence (all April 2009), and Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian), Law Lords Condemn UK’s Use of Secret Evidence And Control Orders (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), Britain’s Torture Troubles: What Tony Blair Knew (June 2009), Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws, Would you be able to cope?: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh, Control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be allowed to leave the UK (all June 2009), Testing control orders and Dismantle the secret state (for the Guardian), UK government issues travel document to control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh after horrific suicide attempt (July 2009), Secret evidence in the case of the North West 10 “terror suspects” (August 2009), Letting go of control orders (for the Guardian, September 2009), Another Blow To Britain’s Crumbling Control Order Regime (September 2009), UK Judge Approves Use of Secret Evidence in Guantánamo Case (November 2009), Calling Time On The Use Of Secret Evidence In The UK (December 2009), Compensation for control orders is a distraction (for the Guardian, January 2010), Control Orders Take Another Blow: Libyan Cartoonist Freed (Detainee DD) (January 2010), Control Orders: Solicitors’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010 and Control Orders: Special Advocates’ Evidence before the Joint Committee on Human Rights, February 3, 2010 (both February 2010), Will Parliament Rid Us of the Cruel and Unjust Control Order Regime? (February 2010), Don’t renew control orders, CAMPACC, JUSTICE and the Joint Committee on Human Rights tell MPs (February 2010), Fahad Hashmi and Terrorist Hysteria in US Courts (April 2010).

I am reproducing it unedited, as I believe that Maude, as a first-time visitor to SIAC, has captured perfectly the surreal imitation of justice that takes place in Britain’s secret terror court. I also believe it is important that a public account of the hearing is made available, as few major media outlets reported on the cases last week (exceptions were the Daily Telegraph, the Independent and Channel 4 News), even though no evidence has been produced to justify the hysteria that attended the announcement of the “plot” back in April (when Prime Minster Gordon Brown declared that it was “a very big terrorist plot”), and the men in question are being held on the basis of secret evidence that they are unable to challenge.

As with the cases of other “terror suspects,” held under control orders or on deportation bail, it appears that, in general, the British media is unconcerned that foreign nationals — and, in the cases of some of the control order detainees, British nationals — can be subjected to a secretive facsimile of justice that bears no resemblance to the rest of Britain’s legal system, so long as the magic words “Islam” and “terrorism” are invoked.

Courts of injustice
By Maude Casey

Until last week, I had never been to the Royal Courts of Justice. In Britain, our justice system has long been a beacon to the world. Here, the most knotty legal conundrums are patiently untangled in a public chamber, in the clear light of reason before an impartial judge, and assessed by a jury which constitutes the ears, eyes and voice of our fellow citizens. These public chambers are freely accessible to members of the public: all have a public gallery where anyone can sit and listen to the proceedings. Everything is transparent; Justice is blind to the prejudices and unmotivated by the interests of either side in each particular case. I had often intended to come and see this for myself.

Certainly the building itself speaks of something like this, in a language of soaring stone and lofty oak. The highest court in the land, it is an edifice carved by rationality, etched by wisdom and gravitas. Voices are low here; the acoustics carry them far. This much was obvious as I waited at the enquiry desk while the helpful young attendant made call after call on his desk phone to find out which court he should direct me to.

I had decided to come to attend the bail appeals of seven young Pakistani students seized from their university libraries in April this year. I had been shocked by the sight of police in paramilitary uniforms, resembling nothing less than storm troopers, dragging students from the halls of academe. I had heard that Manchester Police had subsequently released all of the students without charge, the Chief Constable stating that he could find not a shred of evidence against them. Great was my subsequent astonishment therefore, when I heard that the Home Secretary had subsequently issued them with deportation orders, that their applications for bail had been refused and that they have been held as Category “A” prisoners ever since. And now their appeals for bail were to be heard in a special court: the Special Immigration Appeal Court, or SIAC.

One of the North West 10 “terror suspects,” seized at gunpoint in Liverpool’s John Moores University in April 2009.

SIAC aren’t anything to do with us, the young man at the enquiry desk said. They just use our courts. And sometimes they close our courts to the public. It was difficult for him to find out where he should send me, or — rather alarmingly — whether in fact I was allowed to be there at all, but eventually, after many calls, he directed me to two possibilities: Court 28 on the ground floor, and Court 4 upstairs.

Court 28 was closed to the public; Court 4 was just reconvening after lunch. I was the only person in the public gallery. As I accustomed myself to being in this space which speaks of a closed world, with its walls of beautifully bound Law Reports, its oaken panelling, its flamboyantly carved lion, unicorn and regal coat of arms above the judge’s crimson velvet throne, I began to experience a most extraordinary welter of impressions, an eerie sense of witnessing a previously- scripted narrative unfold.

The solicitor of Shoaib Khan, one of the young men who was sitting in the prisoners’ cage in the company of two prison guards, was making a statement to Judge Mitting, as follows: “Your Honour, in regard to the Secretary of State’s assertion that my client is concerned in international Islamist activity, I will say that my client has a beard. He is a practising Muslim. He goes to prayer at the Mosque. He attends prayer meetings. He will continue these activities. He should not be penalised for practising normal Muslim activities.”

The evidence against the other young man in the dock, Abdul Wahab Khan, appeared equally ghostly. There are videos of him dancing and playing cricket: this means they were at a training camp. They went on a two-hour drive to a beach in Wales: this means they were involved in a terrorist plot. Another of the young men wrote emails to his girlfriend, in which the words “crystal clear” obviously refer to a bomb-making substance in code and “weak and difficult to convince” is code for a low concentration of hydrogen peroxide. And of course, as the Secretary of State has pointed out, they participate in activities carried out by a network of Islamists worldwide: they are room-mates; they pray, they meet other students; they have beards and brown skins.

I felt extremely uncomfortable listening to these arguments. I felt shocked by the resonance of racist rhetoric, amazed by the Alice in Wonderland tone of the absurd.  And I felt a sense of incredulity at the flavour of Orwellian double-speak. I could not believe I was hearing arguments like this go unchallenged in the supposedly rational spaces of a British court.

But then as I looked around and saw no jury, no judge gowned and bewigged like his colleagues in the adjacent court chambers, no proceedings in which defence is evenly balanced against prosecution, I realised that I was witnessing something new in a British court: a court which is not a court, a hearing in which voices speak but no one hears them, because, somewhere far away, minds have already been made up.

And the most menacing aspect of the proceedings was their air of apparent normality. Around the chamber, men chatted quietly and amicably, amiable with that sense of entitlement of men who stretch out their arms on the backs of seats in panelled rooms, sharing a language from which we are excluded. And as the Judge departed to examine evidence no one was allowed to see, no one stood up and asked, “Why? How can they defend themselves if they cannot see the evidence against them?”

The students are part of what Gordon Brown at the time declared to be “a very big terrorist plot,” and yet the Chief Constable of Manchester Police has stated that there was not a shred of evidence against them. At one point I even heard Judge Mitting himself say to the appellants’ solicitors that the strongest argument for their case is this: if there was a big plot to blow something up, how come, after all this time, there is no evidence of any explosives or planning?

The solicitors provided considerable evidence for the innocence of their clients: impeccable academic references; references from landlords; references from local cricket teams; from a UN-funded project in Pakistan; from family members in the US and UK willing to put up their businesses as surety and buy houses in Liverpool for the students to live in under any terms that the Secretary of State might decide. They are willing to wear tags. They will observe any curfew. They will satisfy any bail conditions the Secretary of State might impose.

Furthermore, the solicitors pointed out that as recently as last week the hearings of the original nine students were reduced to seven as two of them were released without explanation [although they are still “required to wear electronic tags as the Home Office still wants to deport them due to visa irregularities,” as the BBC reported]. If suddenly these two are not deemed a security risk, even though the evidence against them is shared by the remaining seven, then how come these remaining seven are considered to be so dangerous? If bail conditions of varying severity are containing these two released young men, why can’t they contain the remaining seven?

It was at this point that the proceedings became chilling, as they assumed the full appearance of a charade. In this court, which is somehow not a court, the Secretary of State’s solicitor made his position clear: The emails of appellant XC to his girlfriend proves that he is the lynchpin of a terrorist network. The other appellants are his associates. If the Secretary of State is right, and if the advice of the Secretary of State’s security advisers is right, we must continue to oppose bail as there has been no change in their assessment that these appellants continue to pose a grave security risk. In contrast to the appellants’ cases, no evidence was provided — apart from this spectral hypothetical. Am I alone in finding this shocking?

Simon Jackson QC mentioned further grounds to support the bail applications, including the letters from educational establishments. However, it emerged that the judge had not received these. Jackson said that they had been made available to Mr. McCullough, the Special Advocate appointed by the government. Am I alone in finding it shocking that this evidence had not been made available to the Judge? In the court, as photocopies were made, it felt even more like a charade, in which evidence was presented but not listened to, because the verdict had already been decided.

The Judge adjourned to see some evidence provided by the Secretary of State in a closed chamber. This evidence is so secret that neither the appellants nor their solicitors were allowed to see it. At this point, the group of lawyers from around the world, who had arrived in the public gallery during the afternoon’s proceedings, asked questions of each other and of me with great puzzlement: so is it really true that the defendants are not allowed to know what evidence is being held against them? In a British Court? But this would not be allowed in my country. This is very strange. Yes, I agreed, it is very strange.

Upon Judge Mitting’s return, he spoke very briefly. In none of these cases do we admit bail. The reasons will be given in writing. The appellants will return to their cells. We will hear all their cases together on 8th March next year.

So here are the facts: none of these seven young men has been charged with anything. If they decide to allow themselves to be deported, they will face the suspicion of terrorist activity in Pakistan, for, after all, if Britain, the cynosure of Justice globally, has found that they pose a grave security risk, then surely they must be terrorists. At worst they could face torture, at best: shame in their families and communities and the devastation of promising careers. They have missed all their lectures since April and they have been unable to sit their exams, despite the requests of their universities. Returned to jail until March as Category “A” prisoners, they are considered to pose the gravest danger to the country. They can be regularly strip-searched and locked up in solitary confinement; their visitors must be cleared by the Home Office, a process which can take months. Innocent of any charge, they are the victims of a hypothetical fantasy; they have been forced to enter a Kafkaesque maze of control from which there appears to be no escape.

Am I alone in believing that this is profoundly shocking? Am I alone in having a faint suspicion that these young men are in prison for the same reason that kept the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four incarcerated for sixteen years: to cover up a stupid mistake on the part of the security services and to enable powerful men to save face? Shame on a system that can decide that young men are guilty of something which no one is allowed to know, based on evidence which is so secret as to be invisible. And from being seven individual young men, they have somehow become fused together into a single unit.

The whole thing would be hilarious were it not for the terrifying fact that these young men really are locked up, right now, as you are reading this, and will continue to be so for the next 213 days, until the date of their next hearing. It would be hilarious were it not for the fact that Janas Khan, one of the students released before this hearing — for reasons which, from where I was sitting, had been concealed from his legal team — is now alone in a town in the north west of England, tagged and obliged to clock in with the private company which administers the tagging system several times a day. He has four assignments to complete for his university, as he could not complete them in prison. He is enduring a menacing system of control, contained by a curfew which eliminates the possibility of the normal social life to which every innocent human being is entitled.

And so they will remain, unless they leave Britain voluntarily, their names besmirched, their academic careers at an end, carrying the stigma of terrorism into a country whose human rights record gives cause for grave concern. They wish to remain here in order to obtain their degrees and to clear their names; they believed Britain’s justice system to be the best in the world, a system in which their cases would be heard impartially and openly, the evidence carefully weighed. Instead, what they are experiencing is this new system, where a hearing is not a hearing, because nobody listens, in a secret chamber which is no court of justice but a scandalous charade, in which the clear light of reason is clouded by shame. The time has come to remove this farce from the field of the normal and to see it for what it is: a sinister travesty against which our voices must be raised.

This is not a hearing: no one is listening. This is not justice: it is a one-sided charade.

Maude Casey is a campaigner with Brighton Against Guantánamo (formerly the Save Omar campaign). She wrote this article after we met last week, at the launch of the Guantánamo Justice Centre, and she explained that she had been the only non-legal observer during last week’s SIAC hearing. I then said that if she would like to write something, I would publish it on my website, as this is not the first time that the mainstream media has largely ignored the SIAC hearings, and also because I’m happy to use my website to host other people’s articles about the injustice of Britain’s anti-terror laws.

In a note accompanying the article, Maude also wrote:

While campaigning for Omar’s release, and then for Binyam’s [Omar Deghayes and Binyam Mohamed], I have become increasingly concerned at how many of our hard-won civil and human rights have been gradually eroded as part of this War of Terror. I attended Diane Abbott’s meeting on Secret Evidence in the House of Commons, but actually being present in a hearing really brings the injustice home to you. For all we know, these young men may indeed be guilty of organising a “big plot,” although I have to say that I doubt it, having heard the open evidence; however the fact is that in a just society they should have the opportunity of a fair trial and the right to clear their names. As a mother, I found it very easy to empathise with their worries about their studies and their reputations, and the thought of them being incarcerated under those conditions for over two hundred more days makes me unable to feel complacent.

Note: Please visit the website “Justice for the North West 10” for more information, and see here for a Channel 4 interview with Janas Khan, on July 19, in which C4 explained that, although Khan was told that “he was no longer considered a threat to national security … he is still being made to wear an electronic tag and is facing deportation.” For the background to the circumstances in which the raid in April took place, and the subsequent resignation of Scotland Yard’s anti-terrorism chief Bob Quick, who had been photographed arriving at Downing Street with “top secret” documents about the plot visible under his arm, see this report in the Guardian. For another analysis, see this Press Association report in the Independent. Also of interest are the remarks of Khaled Rahman, director of the Institute of Policy Studies in Islamabad, in an interview with Radio France Internationale, after a row broke out between the British and Pakistani governments regarding the vetting of Pakistani students visiting the UK to study. Rahman said, “Pakistani people would like to have some really credible evidence available to them because the happenings so far have not been proved in any court of law in most of the cases.”

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

For other articles dealing with Belmarsh, control orders, deportation bail, deportations and extraditions, see Deals with dictators undermined by British request for return of five Guantánamo detainees (August 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: the troubling tale of Tunisian Belmarsh detainee Hedi Boudhiba, extradited, cleared and abandoned in Spain (August 2007), Guantánamo as house arrest: Britain’s law lords capitulate on control orders (November 2007), The Guantánamo Britons and Spain’s dubious extradition request (December 2007), Britain’s Guantánamo: control orders renewed, as one suspect is freed (February 2008), Spanish drop “inhuman” extradition request for Guantánamo Britons (March 2008), UK government deports 60 Iraqi Kurds; no one notices (March 2008), Repatriation as Russian Roulette: Will the Two Algerians Freed from Guantánamo Be Treated Fairly? (July 2008), Abu Qatada: Law Lords and Government Endorse Torture (February 2009), Ex-Guantánamo prisoner refused entry into UK, held in deportation centre (February 2009), Home Secretary ignores Court decision, kidnaps bailed men and imprisons them in Belmarsh (February 2009), Britain’s insane secret terror evidence (March 2009), Torture taints all our lives (published in the Guardian’s Comment is free), Britain’s Guantánamo: Calling For An End To Secret Evidence, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (1) Detainee Y, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (2) Detainee BB, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (3) Detainee U, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (4) Hussain Al-Samamara, Five Stories From Britain’s Guantánamo: (5) Detainee Z, Britain’s Guantánamo: Fact or Fiction? and URGENT APPEAL on British terror laws: Get your MP to support Diane Abbott’s Early Day Motion on the use of secret evidence (all April 2009), and Taking liberties with our justice system and Death in Libya, betrayal in the West (both for the Guardian), Law Lords Condemn UK’s Use of Secret Evidence And Control Orders (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009), Britain’s Torture Troubles: What Tony Blair Knew (June 2009), Seven years of madness: the harrowing tale of Mahmoud Abu Rideh and Britain’s anti-terror laws, Would you be able to cope?: Letters by the children of control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh, Control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh to be allowed to leave the UK (all June 2009), Testing control orders and Dismantle the secret state (for the Guardian), UK government issues travel document to control order detainee Mahmoud Abu Rideh after horrific suicide attempt (July 2009).

Four years ago today, this country suffered a terrible atrocity at the hands of terrorists: 52 people were killed and many more horribly injured. I stood at the dispatch box that day and spoke of the need to face down this barbarism. In the subsequent weeks and months, I was proud of the calm and just way that the ordinary British citizen dealt with this assault and of the comparative absence of people trying to make scapegoats of the ordinary, decent Muslim community. I was proud of the courage, sense of honour, tolerance and justice of our citizens at home.

I am afraid that I cannot be so complimentary about the actions of our government abroad. In the last year, there have been at least 15 cases of British citizens or British residents claiming to be tortured by foreign intelligence agencies with the knowledge, complicity and, in some cases, presence of British intelligence officers. One case — that of Binyam Mohamed — has been referred to the police by the attorney general, which implies that there is at least a prima facie case to answer. The most salient others include Moazzam Begg, Tariq Mahmoud, Salahuddin Amin and Rashid Rauf, all in Pakistan, Jamil Rahman in Bangladesh, Alam Ghafoor in United Arab Emirates, and Azhar Khan and others in Egypt.

For each case, the government have denied complicity, but at the same time fiercely defended the secrecy of their actions, making it impossible to put the full facts in the public domain, despite the clear public interest in doing so. Although the combined circumstantial evidence of complicity in all these cases is overwhelming, it has not so far been possible — because of the government’s improper use of state secrecy to cover up the evidence — to establish absolutely clear sequences of cause and effect.

In the case I am about to describe, we can follow the entire chain of events from original suspicion, through active encouragement of the Pakistani authorities to arrest and through the subsequent collaboration between UK and Pakistani agencies. This is the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, a convicted terrorist, whose treatment I can describe in some detail.

As the House will realise, the account I am about to relay comes from several sources. I cannot properly give my sources, given the vindictive attitude of this government, particularly the Foreign Office, to whistleblowers. Indeed, in this case of Rangzieb Ahmed, the authorities were so paranoid that they threatened to arrest a journalist for reporting facts stated in open court. Nevertheless, although I am prevented from naming my sources, I can say that I am confident of these facts beyond reasonable doubt. I will not, of course, disclose any names, or anything that discloses intelligence agency techniques — other than torture — or other issues that threaten national security.

I should say that the individual whose case I am going to describe is not someone for whom I have any natural sympathy. He is a convicted — indeed, self-confessed — terrorist. So what I am talking about today is just as much about defending our own civilised standards as it is about deploring what was done to this man in the name of defending our country.

In 2005-06, Rangzieb Ahmed was a suspected terrorist who was kept under surveillance for about a year before leaving the country to go first to Dubai and on a subsequent trip to Pakistan. During that time, evidence was collected against him, on the basis of which he was later convicted. Let me repeat that point, as it is very important to my subsequent argument — during that time, evidence was collected, on the basis of which he was subsequently convicted.

Despite the authorities having that evidence, he was — astonishingly — not arrested but instead allowed to leave the country. To understand how odd this decision was, we should remember that this was only a year after the tragedy of 7/7, after which agencies were criticised for allowing terrorist suspects to leave the country to go to Pakistan. Since they knew he was leaving, since they knew where he was going, and since they had more than enough evidence to arrest him, allowing him to leave was clearly deliberate. That the authorities knew his itinerary is demonstrated by the fact that he was kept under surveillance when he was in Dubai. He later went on to Pakistan, where the Pakistani authorities were warned of his arrival by the British government. The British intelligence agencies wrote to their opposite numbers in Pakistan — the members of the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence — suggesting that they arrest him. I use the word “suggest” rather than “request” or “recommend” because of the peculiar language of the ISI’s communication. No doubt the minister can confirm that for himself by asking to see the record.

We also know that the intelligence officer who wrote to the Pakistanis did so in full knowledge of the normal methods used by the ISI against terrorist suspects that it holds. That is unsurprising, as it is common public knowledge in Pakistan. The officer would therefore be aware that “suggesting” arrest was equivalent to “suggesting” torture.

Rangzieb Ahmed was arrested by the ISI on 20 August 2006. Once he was taken into custody in Pakistan by the ISI, the Manchester police and MI5 together created a list of questions to be put to him. MI5 arranged for those questions to be given to the ISI.

Rangzieb Ahmed was viciously tortured by the ISI. He says, among other things, that he was beaten with wooden staves the size of cricket stumps and whipped with a 3ft length of tyre rubber nailed to a wooden handle, and that three fingernails were removed from his left hand. There is a dispute between Ahmed and British intelligence officers about exactly when his fingernails were removed, but an independent pathologist employed by the Crown Prosecution Service confirmed that it happened during the period when he was in Pakistani custody.

Rangzieb was asked questions, under torture, about the UK by ISI officers. He claims that he saw “UK/Pakistan Secret” on the question list used by the ISI. That was presumably the list put together by the Manchester police and MI5. After about 13 days, he was visited by an officer from MI5 and another from MI6. He claims to have told them, during questioning, that he had been tortured. They deny that, but it is significant that they did not return for further interviews. By that stage, MI5 policy was not to return after any interview in which the subject claimed that he had been tortured. The British agents did not return, but Rangzieb was subsequently questioned by Americans.

Is it also an extraordinary, if sinister, coincidence that the Manchester police accessed Rangzieb Ahmed’s medical records within days of the MI5/MI6 interview? Why would they do that if he was in perfect health?

Rangzieb Ahmed was kept in detention by the Pakistani authorities for a total of 13 months — first at the ISI centre, then at Rawalpindi and then at Adiyala jail — before being deported to the United Kingdom in September 2007. He was tried and convicted of terrorist offences in late 2008 — according to the prosecution, entirely on the basis of evidence obtained while he was under surveillance in the UK and Dubai in 2005-06. I cannot imagine a more obvious case of the outsourcing of torture, a more obvious case of “passive rendition.”

Let me recap. Rangzieb Ahmed should have been arrested by the UK in 2006, but he was not. The authorities knew that he intended to travel to Pakistan, so they should have prevented that; instead, they suggested that the ISI arrest him. They knew that he would be tortured, and they arranged to construct a list of questions and supply it to the ISI.

The authorities know full well that this story is an evidential showcase for the policy of complicity in torture, should that evidence ever come out. One way in which the in-camera veil of secrecy might be lifted would be a civil case by Mr. Ahmed against the government for their complicity in torture. Part of that process would involve challenging the in-camera rulings and revealing the details of agency involvement. Just such a case was being considered by Mr. Ahmed, and on 20 April this year he was visited in prison by his solicitor and a specialist legal adviser to discuss it.

Mr. Ahmed tells us that a week later he was visited by an officer from MI5 and a policeman. That is the story told today on the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Guardian. During the course of their visit they said that they would like him to help in the fight against terror with information about extremism. This is perfectly proper.

However, the sinister part of this visit was an alleged request to drop his allegations of torture: if he did that, they could get his sentence cut and possibly give him some money. If this request to drop the torture case is true, it is frankly monstrous. It would at the very least be a criminal misuse of the powers and funds under the government’s Contest strategy, and at worst a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.

I would normally be disinclined to believe the word of a convicted terrorist. However, when he initially told his lawyer about it, he did not want to pursue the matter. Also, in common with many other criminals, after the scandal of the taping of the current minister of state, Department for Transport, the Right Honourable member for Tooting [Sadiq Khan], on a prison visit, he believes all these meetings are taped and he says this will back him up.

Given that belief, he is unlikely to have made an allegation that would be so easily proven wrong. I do not believe the conversation was taped, but it would have been videoed and this could be used to check his story. For reasons of policy and natural justice, it is imperative that the Crown Prosecution service investigates this allegation immediately, but that is not my principal concern today.

My questions to the minister are as follows: First, will he undertake to look at the in-camera court records and the records of the police and intelligence agencies so that he can confirm for his own satisfaction that my account of the handling of Rangzieb Ahmed pre-trial is correct? That process should take only a few days. Secondly, will he publish the current guidelines governing the agencies handling the suspected torture so that we can see whether the UK authorities broke those guidelines or whether it was the policy that was at fault? The Prime Minister has undertaken to publish the new guidelines, so if the minister cannot publish the current ones, can he explain why his approach is different to the Prime Minister’s?

Thirdly, I believe, but cannot be certain to an evidential level, that the judge in the court case intimated that disciplinary action should be considered within the intelligence agencies. Was this done? If not, why not?

Finally, can the minister now announce a proper judicial inquiry into the allegations of UK complicity in torture, since it is now clear that there is not just circumstantial evidence but hard evidence in government records for ministers to read, if they had but eyes to see?

Let me conclude by saying that our handling of the subject of torture has, in my view, been completely wrong. The Americans have made a clean breast of their complicity, while explicitly not prosecuting the junior officers who were acting under instruction at a time of enormous duress and perceived threat after 9/11. We have done the opposite. As things stand, we are awaiting a police investigation that will presumably end in the prosecution of the frontline officers involved. At the same time, the government are fighting tooth and nail to use state secrecy to cover up crimes and political embarrassments to protect those who are probably the real villains in the piece — those who approved these policies in the first place.

The battle against terrorism is not just a fight for life; it is a battle of ideas and ideals. It is a battle between good and evil, between civilisation and barbarism. In that fight, we should never allow our standards to drop to those of our enemies. We cannot defend our civilisation by giving up the values of that civilisation. I hope the minister will today help me in ensuring that we find out what has gone wrong so we can return to defending those values once again.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

As Davis explained, “We … know that the intelligence officer who wrote to the Pakistanis did so in full knowledge of the normal methods used by the ISI against terrorist suspects that it holds. That is unsurprising, as it is common public knowledge in Pakistan. The officer would therefore be aware that ‘suggesting’ arrest was equivalent to ‘suggesting’ torture.”

What makes this case particularly shocking, as Davis also explained — and repeated for emphasis — is that all this took place even though Ahmed had been “kept under surveillance” in the UK “for about a year” before departing for Pakistan, and that “during that time, evidence was collected, on the basis of which he was subsequently convicted.”

I’m reproducing David Davis’ statement in full in an accompanying article, because of its enormous significance. As the Guardian explained yesterday, “This is the first time that the information has entered the public domain. Previously it has been suppressed through the process of secret court hearings and, had the Guardian or other media organisations reported it, they would have exposed themselves to the risk of prosecution for contempt of court.”

Davis himself was scathing about the government’s secrecy. After stating that, “In the last year, there have been at least 15 cases of British citizens or British residents claiming to be tortured by foreign intelligence agencies with the knowledge, complicity and, in some cases, presence of British intelligence officers,” he added, “For each case, the government have denied complicity, but at the same time fiercely defended the secrecy of their actions, making it impossible to put the full facts in the public domain, despite the clear public interest in doing so. Although the combined circumstantial evidence of complicity in all these cases is overwhelming, it has not so far been possible — because of the government’s improper use of state secrecy to cover up the evidence — to establish absolutely clear sequences of cause and effect.”

In the case of Rangzieb Ahmed, which he reported in painstaking detail, Davis also noted that “the authorities were so paranoid that they threatened to arrest a journalist for reporting facts stated in open court.”

This is clearly not the end of the story. Davis suggested that “One way in which the in-camera veil of secrecy might be lifted would be a civil case by Mr. Ahmed against the government for their complicity in torture,” in which part of the process “would involve challenging the in-camera rulings and revealing the details of agency involvement.” He explained that “Just such a case was being considered by Mr. Ahmed, and on 20 April this year he was visited in prison by his solicitor and a specialist legal adviser to discuss it.”

However, as Davis also explained, just a week after Rangzieb Ahmed met his lawyer, he was visited by “an officer from MI5 and a policeman,” who allegedly requested him “to drop his allegations of torture” in exchange for a reduced sentence and a financial reward. This was reported in the Guardian the day before David Davis made his statement, prompting Davis to suggest that, if the allegation is true, it may represent “a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice.”

Although this allegation preceded Davis’ statement, lawyers for two of the men who were tortured in Pakistan — Rangzieb Ahmed and Salahuddin Amin — have already followed up on the MP’s extraordinary revelations by writing to the Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, asking him to “establish a public inquiry to investigate the complicity of government employees in the illegal detention and torture” of both men (as the Guardian reported late last night), and Human Rights Watch also followed up on Davis’ wider allegations, reporting today that:

In off-the-record conversations, knowledgeable civilian and military officials of the government of Pakistan have on numerous occasions told Human Rights Watch that British officials were aware of the mistreatment of several high-profile terrorism suspects, including Britons Rangzieb Ahmed, Salahuddin Amin, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Rashid Rauf and others. Pakistani officials told Human Rights Watch that they were under immense pressure from the UK and the US to “perform” in the “war on terror” and “we do what we are asked to do.”

A well placed official within the UK government told Human Rights Watch that allegations of UK complicity made by Human Rights Watch in testimony to the UK Parliament’s Joint Human Rights Committee in February 2009 were accurate. The official encouraged Human Rights Watch to continue its research into the subject. Another Whitehall source told Human Rights Watch that its research was “spot on.”

In the case of Salahuddin Amin, who was convicted in the UK in April 2007 for “plotting attacks against several potential targets” in London, despite being “tortured repeatedly” in Pakistan and “forced into false confessions,” Human Rights Watch noted that Pakistani intelligence sources told them that “Amin’s was a ‘high pressure’ case and the British and American desire for information from him was ‘insatiable.’” They added that both the British and American agents who were “party” to his detention were “perfectly aware that we were using all means possible to extract information from him and were grateful that we were doing so.”

While I await further information, I urge you not only to read David Davis’ full statement and the Human Rights Watch article, but also to read “The Truth About Torture,” a full-length article by Ian Cobain, based largely on his own research into the cases of Salahuddin Amin, Zeeshan Siddiqui, Rangzieb Ahmed, Rashid Rauf, Tariq Mahmood and Tahir Shah (all held in Pakistan), Binyam Mohamed (held in Pakistan before his rendition to torture in Morocco), Alam Ghafoor and Mohammed Rafiq Siddique (held in the UAE), and Jamil Rahman (held in Bangladesh), which appeared in yesterday’s G2 supplement and provides the best summary to date of how, as America’s closest ally in the “War on Terror,” Britain became complicit in torture to a shocking extent that is still being revealed.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

In the article, I also look at other examples of British involvement in torture in other countries, focusing on the case of Binyam Mohamed, and the recent revelation of the existence of a British spy, Informant A, who visited Mohamed while he was held in Morocco, and the many cases in Pakistan, which Ian Cobain has reported in detail over the last year.

After a close reading of the government’s approach to “intelligence possibly derived through torture” (as discussed in the FCO’s most recent annual report — PDF, p. 16), I reach a rather unnerving conclusion about where, exactly, this “intelligence” was produced in the first place: essentially, through British involvement in the process, and not, as might be expected, from interrogations by brutal regimes with which the British government had no direct involvement.

The case of Jamil Rahman, who is starting civil proceedings against home secretary Jacqui Smith, confirms that we desperately need a proper investigation of the UK government’s complicity in the use of torture, to close a loophole that, with each passing day, seems only to demonstrate that, when it comes to manipulating the absolute prohibition of the use of torture, the British government was as enthusiastically lawless as the government of George W. Bush.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed, and see here for my definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009.

Binyam has heard these rumors before — since December, in fact, when he told his lawyers, “It has come to my attention through several reliable sources that my release from Guantánamo to the UK had been ordered several weeks ago” — but there now seems little reason to doubt that the rumors are true. Although the story of Binyam’s rendition and torture (for 18 months in Morocco, from July 2002 to January 2004, and then at the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan) has been in the public domain for three and a half years — and it has long been established that the plot to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in New York, in which he was allegedly involved, was not a plot at all, and that he had only confessed to having a role in it because of the torture to which he was subjected — the Bush administration only reluctantly abandoned its claims last October, when a US judge demanded to see the evidence.

In the UK, Binyam’s case has been even more significant. Last August, two High Court judges condemned Britain’s intelligence services for their role in his rendition and torture. The judges were disturbed to discover that MI5 had sent agents to interrogate him in May 2002, five weeks after he was seized at Karachi airport, because it should have been clear that he was being held illegally in Pakistan, and they also criticized the intelligence services for providing and receiving intelligence about him from July 2002 until February 2003, when they knew that he was being held incommunicado, and should not have been involved without receiving cast-iron assurances about his welfare. The relationship of the United Kingdom to the United States, the judges stated, “went far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing.”

The US State Department v. David Miliband

The judges also indicated that they thought that information contained in 42 documents in the possession of the British government, which related to Binyam’s rendition and torture, should be made available to the public. However, the foreign secretary, David Miliband, responded by invoking issues of national security to prevent disclosure of the documents, and also produced a letter from the US State Department’s senior legal adviser, John Bellinger, which indicated that disclosure would damage the relationship between the British and American intelligence agencies. “We want to affirm in the clearest terms,” the letter stated, “that the public disclosure of these documents or of the information contained therein is likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence-sharing arrangements.”

Despite the foreign secretary’s most fervent wishes, however, questions about Binyam’s treatment — and about British complicity in his rendition and torture — have not gone away. Just last weekend, the focus on the British government’s role sharpened considerably when, after David Miliband denied that the US had made a specific threat, and attempted to explain that the issue was only one of the “fundamental principle” of confidentiality between one country and another, a “former senior State Department official” told the Observer that the letter that mentioned possible “harm” to the intelligence-sharing relationship between the US and the UK had been solicited directly by the Foreign Office.

“Far from being a threat,” the former official stated, “it was solicited [by the Foreign Office]. The Foreign Office asked for it in writing. They said: ‘Give us something in writing so that we can put it on the record.’ If you give us a letter explaining you are opposed to this, then we can provide that to the court.”

As the Observer reported, the Foreign Office immediately tried to play down the significance of its role, confirming that it had requested the letter from the State Department, but claiming that it was merely “sensible and proper” to require a US statement as part of the legal proceedings. Others were not convinced, however, and Tory MP David Davis accused the foreign secretary of acting to “prevent his own government’s embarrassment.”

Pakistani torture as “part of a deliberate British policy”

If Sunday’s news was troubling enough for the government, its credibility declined still further during the week, after the Guardian examined testimony made last summer, during Binyam’s judicial review, by an MI5 agent identified only as Witness B, who was responsible for questioning Binyam in Pakistan, prior to his rendition to Morocco. As the Guardian explained, the testimony of Witness B indicated that the circumstances of Binyam’s interrogation in Pakistan were part of a deliberate British policy, devised by legal advisers to the security services and the government.

The statements came towards the end of the following exchange, in which Witness B was questioned by Dinah Rose QC, who began by reading out the following extract from the agent’s notes of his interview with Binyam in May 2002: “I told Mohamed he had an opportunity to help us and help himself. The US authorities will be deciding what to do with him and this will depend to a very large degree on his degree of cooperation.”

Q. Why did you say to him that the US authorities would be deciding what to do with him?
A. Because I expected the Pakistani authorities to transfer him to the US authorities.
Q. Why did you expect that to happen?
A. Because that had happened in previous cases of which I was aware and also at some point I may have been told that that was the intention of the US authorities.
Q. Did you speak to any Americans before you interviewed Mr. Mohamed?
A. I am not sure whether I can give a full answer to that in open session.
Q. I am content to leave that for Mr. De La Mare to pursue [the Special Advocate appointed to represent Binyam in closed sessions, in which secret evidence was discussed]. Was it your understanding that it was lawful for Mr. Mohamed to be transferred to the US authorities in this way?
A. I consider that to be a matter for the Security Service top management and for Government.
Q. Had anyone ever told you that it was or was not lawful?
A. I do not recall being told that at all, no.
Q. Did it concern you at all?
A. I was always, whenever conducting an interview, careful to make sure that I had the clearance of my management to proceed and I did so in this case. I was aware that the general question of interviewing detainees had been discussed at length by Security Service management legal advisers and Government and I acted in this case, as in others, under the strong impression that it was considered to be proper and lawful.

Opening a can of worms: other examples of torture

The Guardian also suggested that what it described as “an official interrogation policy” had led to the torture and abuse of other British prisoners, a can of worms that the British government has also been trying desperately to conceal. Last July, for example, the Guardian’s Ian Cobain first reported allegations that the British intelligence services had “outsourced” the torture of British citizens to Pakistan’s security services. Cobain’s article mentioned three particular cases:

A medical student, who did not wish to be identified, explained that he “was abducted at gunpoint in August 2005 and held for two months at the offices of Pakistan’s Intelligence Bureau opposite the British Deputy High Commission in Karachi,” where he was “whipped, beaten, deprived of sleep, threatened with execution and witnessed other inmates being tortured.” He added that he was questioned about the July 2005 terrorist attacks in London, and that “after being tortured by Pakistani agents he was questioned by British intelligence officers.” He is now working in a hospital in southern England, having qualified in 2007, but remains traumatized by what happened to him.

Tariq Mahmood, 35, a taxi driver from Sparkhill, Birmingham, was abducted in Rawalpindi in October 2003 and released without charge about five months later. His family explained that “he was tortured, and that MI5 officers and American intelligence officers had a hand in his mistreatment.”

Tahir Shah, an author from London, was seized in 2005 and held for 16 days. Also interrogated about the July 2005 bombings, he has stated that he was interrogated in “a fully-equipped torture chamber,” containing “mangles, whips and electrical equipment,” where “he was hooded and shackled for long periods and deprived of sleep.” According to the Guardian, “He [did] not allege that British officials were involved, but believe[d] it is unlikely they would not have been informed.”

In December 2008, two other examples came to light. In “The Testimony of Zeeshan Siddiqui” (PDF), published by Cageprisoners, the former engineering student explained how he had been abducted in May 2005 and tortured horribly for ten days. He was then held for another seven months. Although he had no knowledge that the British intelligence services were involved in any way with his treatment in Pakistan, it is clear that the British government subsequently acted on the basis of information that was obtained from him through the use of torture. After returning to the UK, he was placed under a control order, tagged and, essentially, subjected to a form of house arrest. “Eventually,” as Cageprisoners explained, “he took off the control order tag and absconded from the order. Siddiqui is still missing today.”

Even more shocking is the story of Rangzieb Ahmed, from Rochdale, who was convicted in a British court and sentenced to a minimum of ten years in prison for being a member of al-Qaeda and running a three-man terrorist cell. As the Guardian reported, the jury was not allowed to hear that three of Ahmed’s fingernails were removed with pliers during a year-long ordeal in Pakistan, from August 2006 to August 2007, at the hands of the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence), Pakistan’s largest intelligence agency, nor that he was “beaten with sticks, whipped with electric cables, sexually humiliated and deprived of sleep.” The jury was also not informed that the British High Commission had not been told that he was being held until just before his release to the UK (where he was subsequently re-arrested), that “MI5 and Greater Manchester police passed questions to the ISI to be put to Ahmed during his interrogation,” and that MI5 officers also questioned him while he was in ISI custody.

Before the trial began, Ahmed’s barrister, Michael Topolski QC, tried unsuccessfully to have it halted, arguing, with some justification, that, “because of his treatment in Pakistan, it would be an abuse of the court’s process for his trial to go ahead.” Topolski pointed out that British agents, the security services and the police “condoned or connived in his torture by providing his torturers with questions,” and that proceeding with the trial “would put Britain under a clear breach of its obligations, under international law, to suppress and discourage torture.” For a detailed account of Ahmed’s experiences, and his explanation of how he was in Pakistan to assist in relief work, see “The Testimony of Rangzieb Ahmed” (PDF), published by Cageprisoners just after his conviction.

The full extent of the murky connections between MI5 and the Pakistani intelligence agencies has yet to be revealed, of course, but it is clearly an issue that needs a thorough investigation, especially as the Guardian stated last week that it had “learned from other sources that the interrogation policy was directed at a high level within Whitehall and that it has been further developed since [Binyam] Mohamed’s detention in Pakistan.” Fortunately, the Joint Committee on Human Rights, chaired by Andrew Dismore MP, is pursuing the matter, and, two weeks ago, stated that the home secretary, Jacqui Smith, would be called to give evidence. Dismore explained that he had come to believe “that the security services may be operating under a James Bond-style get-out clause.”

Some pragmatic reasons for Binyam’s return

As a result of all this activity, it is no surprise that Binyam Mohamed may be back in the UK by Monday. However, while the British government is to be congratulated for pushing for his release for the last 18 months — since first requesting his return to the UK in August 2007 — I hope I don’t sound overly cynical when I add that securing his return will also have the knock-on effect of reducing public discussion of his case to the bare minimum. Like the British residents returned in March and December 2007, Binyam will have no rights on his return, and, until the British government sorts out his residency status, will be unwilling to talk about his experiences, even if he should wish to do so. More significantly, perhaps, his supporters will also be obliged to remain quiet on his behalf.

This is not to say that the government is attempting to shirk all of its responsibilities for what happened to Binyam. As was made clear in October, when Jacqui Smith asked the attorney general, Baroness Scotland, to look into “possible criminal wrongdoing” on the part of MI5 and the CIA, the government has certainly opened up high-level channels to investigate Binyam’s case, and his supporters were, no doubt, pleased to hear on Wednesday that Baroness Scotland has now sought the advice of Keir Starmer, the Director of Public Prosecutions.

As the Guardian reported, Baroness Scotland wrote a letter to Andrew Dismore, in which she explained that she had seen evidence that MI5 had given in secret to the High Court, and stated, “I am, with the advice of the DPP, considering the material in order to determine whether there is a basis for inviting the police to conduct a criminal investigation in relation to one or more individuals.”

Even so, it remains to be seen whether a full-blown investigation into Binyam’s case will be pursued, and, if so, what sort of timescale is envisaged. As the High Court judges pointed out two weeks ago, another avenue to the truth remains open, as the Intelligence Services Committee (ISC), an independent investigative committee that has already looked into Binyam’s case, in 2005 and 2007, has been given copies of the 42 documents whose disclosure the government has fought so hard to suppress, and will, in the judges’ words, be able to “ask searching and difficult questions” from witnesses in the intelligence services “on the very important issues raised.” However, I maintain, in spite of this, that Binyam’s imminent return to the UK is useful to the government on a number of different levels, not all of which involve the pursuit of justice.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.

As written exclusively for Cageprisoners.

For a sequence of articles relating to Binyam Mohamed, see the following: Urgent appeal for British resident Binyam Mohamed, “close to suicide” in Guantánamo (December 2007), Guantánamo: Torture victim Binyam Mohamed sues British government for evidence (May 2008), Binyam Mohamed’s letter from Guantánamo to Gordon Brown (May 2008), Guantánamo trials: critical judge sacked, British torture victim charged (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed: UK court grants judicial review over torture allegations, as US files official charges (June 2008), Binyam Mohamed’s judicial review: judges grill British agent and question fairness of Guantánamo trials (August 2008), High Court rules against UK and US in case of Guantánamo torture victim Binyam Mohamed (August 2008), In a plea from Guantánamo, Binyam Mohamed talks of “betrayal” by the UK (September 2008), US Justice Department drops “dirty bomb plot” allegation against Binyam Mohamed (October 2008), Meltdown at the Guantánamo Trials (October 2008), Guilt By Torture: Binyam Mohamed’s Transatlantic Quest for Justice (November 2008), A History of Music Torture in the “War on Terror” (December 2008), Is Robert Gates Guilty of Perjury in Guantánamo Torture Case? (December 2008), British torture victim Binyam Mohamed to be released from Guantánamo (January 2009), Don’t Forget Guantánamo (February 2009), The Betrayal of British Torture Victim Binyam Mohamed (February 2009), Hiding Torture And Freeing Binyam Mohamed From Guantánamo (February 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s statement on his release from Guantánamo (February 2009), Who Is Binyam Mohamed, the British resident released from Guantánamo? (February 2009), Seven Years of Torture: Binyam Mohamed Tells His Story (March 2009), Binyam Mohamed’s Plea Bargain: Trading Torture For Freedom (March 2009), Guantánamo, Bagram and the “Dark Prison”: Binyam Mohamed talks to Moazzam Begg (March 2009), Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Messages On Torture (includes the Jeppesen lawsuit, May 2009), UK Government Lies Exposed; Spy Visited Binyam Mohamed In Morocco (May 2009), Daily Mail Pulls Story About Binyam Mohamed And British Spy (May 2009), Government Bans Testimony On Binyam Mohamed And The British Spy (May 2009), More twists in the tale of Binyam Mohamed (in the Guardian, May 2009), Did Hillary Clinton Threaten UK Over Binyam Mohamed Torture Disclosure? (May 2009), Outsourcing torture to foreign climes (in the Guardian, May 2009), Binyam Mohamed: Was Muhammad Salih’s Death In Guantánamo Suicide? (June 2009), Miliband Shows Leadership, Reveals Nothing About Torture To Parliamentary Committee (June 2009).

Like many Britons who opposed the Iraq war –- and who are opposed to the lingering, and very real colonialism at the heart of British foreign policy –- I find it hard to stand in solidarity with those who led this country into the Iraq war (or who were complicit in it), as I don’t believe that it’s possible to take the high moral ground without first changing our policies –- with all the economic disadvantage and geopolitical “weakness” that this would entail. To be fair, Gordon Brown has at least begun to distance himself from his predecessor’s rhetoric, instructing his officials no longer to refer to the “War on Terror,” and refusing specifically to mention Muslims when referring to terrorists. In a BBC interview, he described al-Qaeda as “a terrorist cause that is totally unacceptable to mainstream people in every faith in every part of the world,” and wisely presented the challenge facing Britain as a police action against criminals, rather than a clash of civilizations. As Seamus Milne pointed out in the Guardian, however, the government’s continued denial that Britain’s foreign policy has anything to do with the UK’s status as a prominent terrorist target is both “delusional and dangerous.” Milne explained that, like Tony Blair before him, Gordon Brown had called the terror plot an attack on “our British way of life” and the “values that we represent,” which was “unrelated” to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or any other conflict.

Nevertheless, there is a profound difference between expressing anger about British foreign policy and attempting to kill British citizens as a result, and I am reminded, as are many British people who lived through this period, of the conflict between the British government and the IRA from the 1970s to the 1990s. Whilst it’s perfectly comprehensible to me that Guantánamo, and the secret prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere are the modern-day equivalent of the Maze, and that these prisons, and the control orders imposed by the British government on “terror suspects” in the UK, are the modern-day equivalent of internment, the corollary –- that these policies are a breeding ground for the massively increased recruitment of “soldiers” dedicated to the overthrow of the hateful enemy –- should also not blind us to the fact that, as in the 1970s and 1980s, many of these recruits, while legitimately angry, demonstrate through their actions neither a brave piety nor the noble cause of the “freedom fighter,” but rather a callous disregard for human life and a fanaticism that actually marks them out as psychopaths and criminals. There is no God in a car bomb, just as there is no God in carpet-bombing or caging men for five and a half years in Guantánamo.

If there is to be an effective response in the UK to the growth of homicidal criminals masquerading as religious martyrs, then it must come through dialogue rather than confrontation; through sincere attempts by decent people within all the UK’s communities to overcome Manichean suspicions of the “other,” and to confront individuals who represent their countries or their religions as weapons of vengeance or “justice” rather than as advocates of peace, whether these are false politicians defending mass murder in the name of freedom and democracy, or false imams defending mass murder in the name of Allah. As noted above, Gordon Brown has at least begun to make moves towards breaking with the style of his predecessor –- although much more remains to be done –- and representatives of Britain’s many and varied Muslim communities have also spoken out loudly against the latest plots, taking out full-page newspaper advertisements –- as they did after the 7/7 bombings –- condemning the perpetrators, rejecting any attempts to link criminal activities to the teachings of Islam, and calling for society to remain united. Speaking to al-Jazeera, Ihtisham Hibatullah, a spokesman for the British Muslim Initiative, one of the organizers of the campaign, said, “The overwhelming response has come from the medical profession. People in the profession want to be heard saying, ‘not in their name.’”

The need to react to the recent terror plots with a measured response has been highlighted over the last week in the reports of racist attacks on Muslim-owned properties in Scotland –- in particular an attack on an Asian-owned newsagent in Riddrie, in Glasgow’s East End, which was destroyed by what press reports described as a “massive fire and explosion” after being rammed by a car, an attack on an estate agent next to a mosque in Bathgate, in West Lothian, and damage inflicted on a shop in Alva, near Stirling, that is owned by the family of Mohammed Atif Siddique, a student facing trial for alleged terrorist offences, whose arrest in April 2006 has been criticized by the campaigning group Scotland Against Criminalising Communities and other organizations.

Another unfortunate side-effect of the fear and paranoia that follows terrorist attacks is a tendency to blur the distinctions between, on the one hand, the legitimate criminal investigation of suspects, and, on the other, excessive responses that make a mockery of the law, curtail civil liberties and lead to shocking miscarriages of justice. While Gordon Brown avoided a knee-jerk reaction to the recent plots, refusing to call immediately for an increase in the time that suspects can be held without charge from 28 to 90 days, he has already signalled his willingness to campaign for just such a move, pressing for an extension of the 28-day limit on detention without charge just a month ago, a move which, as the Observer described it, sent “a powerful signal that he will take a harder line on terrorism than Tony Blair.”

With this in mind, it remains to be seen whether the heightened tension caused by this summer’s terror plots will, eventually, see Brown push for three months’ imprisonment without charge, and whether it will also prevent him from addressing three other issues related to counter-terror operations in the wake of 9/11, which he has inherited from Tony Blair, and which urgently need addressing: the plight of the wrongly imprisoned British residents in Guantánamo Bay, the continuing, and illegal campaign by the Home Office to hold terror suspects without charge or trial, under the widely-reviled control orders that keep them under virtual house arrest, and the attempt to circumvent international safeguards preventing the return of non-citizens to countries where they face the risk of torture, imprisonment and even death.

All three of these issues –- which in many crucial ways are related to each other –- question the state’s ability to respond appropriately –- and with justice –- to the threats posed to the UK by terrorists, and Gordon Brown’s response to them will be as much an indicator of his desire to distance himself from his predecessor as his calm response to the recent terror plots. In an article to follow shortly, I will look in depth at these issues, examining the government’s motivations for its actions, highlighting the egregious human rights abuses for which it is responsible, and explaining why it is imperative that Gordon Brown returns to the rule of law.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by Macmillan in the US, and available from Amazon — click on the following for the US and the UK). To receive new articles in your inbox, please subscribe to my RSS feed.