Was HM Government ‘complicit’ in torture?

No, says MI6 head Sir John Scarlett.

A slightly more nuanced line comes from Ministers David Miliband and Alan Johnson:

Yet intelligence from overseas is critical to our success in stopping terrorism. All the most serious plots and attacks in the UK in this decade have had significant links abroad. Our agencies must work with their equivalents overseas. So we have to work hard to ensure that we do not collude in torture or mistreatment.

Whether passing information which might lead to suspects being detained; passing questions to be put to detainees; or directly interviewing them, our agencies are required to seek to minimise, and where possible avoid, the risk of mistreatment. Enormous effort goes into assessing the risks in each case. Operations have been halted where the risk of mistreatment was too high.

But it is not possible to eradicate all risk. Judgments need to be made…

Craig Murray rejects all this as Lies:

Scarlett was responsible for the dossier on Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction, which was a tissue of lies from beginning to end. Any sane journalist would treat him with ridicule and opprobrium as one of the most notorious liars in British history. Instead they afford him undue respect.

Not one of the government’s reponses has addressed the irrefutable evidence I gave to the Parliamentary joint committee. The extraordinary thing is that all the meetings I discussed were minuted and the minutes exist in the FCO. I released official documents referring to those meetings. If I were lying, the government would only have to release the minutes. This they refuse to do.

Hmm.

Craig is right that the journalists are not asking the politicians and spies exactly the right question, namely this one:

What happens if you have reason to believe that a credible piece of foreign inteligence which might be useful in saving lives in the UK or elsewhere may have come from torture or abuse overseas?

If that one does not work, try this:

What would you do if you received material known to have been obtained by foreign torture which might help save UK lives? Would you use it or not? Would using such information make HMG ‘complicit’ in torture?

Yet I don’t think Craig is right in saying that the papers he has ‘published’ on his site show any irrefutable evidence of anything.

He tends to draw heavily on the minute produced on 13 March 2003 by the then FCO Legal Adviser Michael Wood. Here it is.

But what does Michael say? His key conclusion is this: that under UK law any statement established (Note: not ‘suspected’) to have been made as a result of torture would not be admissible as evidence (Note: NB which does not mean that it can not be used by other parts of government as appropriate).

And Michael’s view was upheld in 2005 by a famous House of Lords judgement about which Craig writes approvingly in his first book. See especially Lord Nicholls:

If the police were to learn of the whereabouts of a ticking bomb it would be ludicrous for them to disregard this information if it had been procured by torture. No one suggests the police should act in this way.

Similarly, if tainted information points a finger of suspicion at a particular individual: depending on the circumstances, this information is a matter the police may properly take into account when considering, for example, whether to make an arrest.

In both these instances the executive arm of the state is open to the charge that it is condoning the use of torture. So, in a sense, it is. The government is using information obtained by torture.

But in cases such as these the government cannot be expected to close its eyes to this information at the price of endangering the lives of its own citizens. Moral repugnance to torture does not require this.

That view is the one the government currently are perching on, albeit unhappily in presentational terms. But it is a pretty solid perch in law, as far as I can see…