Always a pleasure to post a comment on Craig Murray’s site. His readers are so smart and droll in reply, giving excellent material for my rotating What The Critics Say box:

 

Having visited your blog i must say it doesnt surprise me. Your self-aggrandising careerist pomposity is quite breathtaking

 

I suspect Charles Crawford is arguing for an increase in pension or knighthood or both

 

You are a disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist. Your kind have destroyed the pride of the United Kingdom after Nazism was defeated by our mothers and fathers and grandmothers and grandfathers. You and your peers are incapable of any strategy except lying. You have shredded the international justice embedded in the Geneva Convention. If you had the slightest understanding of the implications of your snotty drivel, you would be looking for a new identity in South America like your Nazi predecessors

 

Charles Crawford…the shallow, self-interested man’s coward and toady

 

In a posting about whether the British Government were ‘aware’ that the CIA was getting intelligence from torture, Craig linked to three FCO documents and said this:

The government knew the CIA was sending us intelligence from torture from at least November 2002, when I sent a diplomatic telegram to Jack Straw and others – including MI5 – informing them so. I repeated it in February 2003, and was called back to a meeting on March 7 2003 where I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law.

My Comment on this posting:

You keep serving up these documents as if they prove your case. Read them. They don’t.

Where in those records or otherwise are the statements supporting your claim that "…I was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law"?

I can’t see them. Can anyone else?

And (to repeat) when the specific issue you raised (namely that HMG’s possession of material known or suspected to have come from torture ipso facto amounted to ‘complicity’ in torture under the Convention) went to the House of Lords, the Law Lords flatly rejected your view.

Craig himself takes up two points made by a sensible commenter:

I am not sure whether you are arguing:

1) HMG was not knowingly receiving any information obtained from torture, and these documents report a completely hypothetical discussion as whether it would be legal; or

2) HMG was knowingly receiving information obtained under torture, and it is not illegal under international law to do so.

Craig fairly asks me: 

What do you think those documents do show? Presumably they do have some point, or the various authors would not have created them. What do you think it was that Jack Straw was agreeing with?

Let’s look at the documents as linked to by Craig. They are well worth a look at top-end formal FCO work in action.

They report a record by senior FCO official Linda Duffield of her conversation with Craig (joined by top FCO Legal Adviser, Michael Wood) which looked at one specific point he had raised, namely “that it was also an offence under the Torture Convention to receive or possess information obtained under torture”.

Michael said at the meeting that he did not think that that was the case under international law. His subsequent minute formally confirmed that view.

The minute from Jack Straw’s office compliments Linda Duffield on how she handled her meeting with the turbulent Craig (and by implication endorses the policy line she and Michael Wood put forward, which of course was later upheld by the House of Lords). It says nothing whatever which might be held against the Foreign Secretary.

So, I win an easy technical knockout. Craig was not ‘told’ on that occasion or otherwise that ‘as a matter of policy’ we were using intelligence from torture.

That does not settle the substance of Craig’s wider point. That we were receiving material probably drawn from torture. And that these documents somehow ‘show’ a cynical if not unlawful approach by the government and endorsed by Jack Straw personally.

Where Craig seems to me to go wrong is that he over-stretches the concept of ‘complicity’ to suit his argument. Craig determinedly supports those jurists such as Professor Sands who argue that merely using or receiving material known or suspected to have been obtained under torture in itself amounts to complicity in that torture.

An eloquent argument in favour of a strong point is not enough. Courts (and politicians, and the public) look also at eloquent arguments in the other direction, particularly in highly complex public policy areas where the role of the Executive to protect the public comes into play. This explains the sense of the House of Lords landmark decision:

  • That it may be acceptable for the state’s executive authorities to receive/acquire and use information which they know or think may have been derived from torture, if they believe that there is a clear public interest in doing so (eg saving lives) 
  • But it is not acceptable for the judicial authorities (courts and tribunals) to hear and use such evidence in reaching conclusions directly affecting the rights of individuals

So, to answer precisely (if long-windedly) the reasonable questions put by one of Craig’s readers:

I think it is fair to say that the British Government were receiving intelligence reports (via the CIA and maybe otherwise) some of which they reasonably could believe were based on information extracted from prisoners through abusive treatment which might well be deemed in a UK court to amount to torture. (Craig himself convincingly pressed the case that any report served up by the Uzbek intelligence agencies had to be suspect on this score.)

That is not in itself illegal under international law. ‘Complicity’ on the part of HMG requires a very close and direct link to the abusive treatment, which in the case of eg Uzbek intelligence was just not there.

Even if receiving such information is not illegal, is it ipso facto always immoral or wrong?

Craig I suspect says a loud Yes.

I won’t do that. I can not conclude that it would be right for Ministers to ignore an intelligence report which might cast light on a terrorist plot to murder British or other citizens – and perhaps allow us to prevent that or some other atrocity happening. I think that in this darkest of moral corners it is just not possible to give clear-cut winner-takes-all answers.

And I have Professor Sands on my side, to this extent (his comment to a Parliamentary Committee on Michael Wood’s minute):

What I say in my written evidence is that insofar as the letter seeks to address a very narrow question it is not formally inaccurate but it misses the bigger point which was addressed in the previous witness’s contribution, namely in what circumstances might the receipt of information obtained through torture constitute complicity within the meaning of article 4 of the convention

Exactly.

In some circumstances the mere receipt of information might (sic) amount to be complicity. In others it would not. In the middle are many grey areas.

And if thinking that makes me a self-aggrandising, careerist, disgraceful, immoral, racial supremacist, shallow, self-interested coward and toady – so be it.