Outsourcing torture to foreign climes
By Andy Worthington, Guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 May 2009 14.49 BST
Jamil Rahman's case suggests, leaving the door to torture ajar allows British and American agents to engineer 'intelligence' from abroad
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- Andy Worthington
- guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 May 2009 14.49 BST
- Article history
In today's Guardian, Ian Cobain tells the disturbing story of Jamil Rahman, a British citizen, raised in south Wales. His claims of abuse in Bangladeshi custody while British intelligence officers were in the same building add another location to an expanding list of countries in which the British intelligence services are accused of being involved in the use of torture. It also provide the clearest indication yet of direct British involvement in interrogations in other countries.
According to Rahman, whose lawyers believe they have enough evidence to start civil proceedings against home secretary Jacqui Smith, two masked men of European origin were present – and appeared to be directing events – when he was seized from the home of his Bangladeshi wife on 1 December 2005 and taken to a cell in an office of the Bangladeshi intelligence services, where he was held for three weeks. Rahman said he was "stripped, beaten and told that his wife would be raped and murdered and her body burned" and made to record a number of false confessions, including a statement that he had masterminded the terrorist attacks in London on 7 July 2005.
What makes Rahman's claims particularly disturbing are his reports about the behaviour of two MI5 agents, who, he said, responded to his complaints that he had been tortured and had made false confessions, by saying, "They haven't done a very good job on you," and adding, "That's good, you've learned your lesson," when interrogations resumed after further abuse.
In this period, when, he says, his passport was taken away and he was told to stay in his wife's village and to talk to no one abut his experiences, he was regularly summoned for further interrogations, at which MI5 officials were present, and was shown hundreds of photographs, including those of friends in the UK, and asked to identify them. Rahman claims that if he did not co-operate, the two British officers would leave the room and he would then be beaten.
British involvement in dubious overseas interrogations is not news, of course. Binyam Mohamed, released from Guantánamo in February, is involved in a court case to establish that the British government knew of his CIA-sponsored torture in Morocco and provided intelligence to his torturers, and just 10 days ago the Mail on Sunday reported that a British spy had actually visited him in Morocco, shattering the government's claims that it did not know where he was being held.
Similarly, over the last year, Ian Cobain has uncovered several examples of close co-operation between the British intelligence services and their counterparts in Pakistan regarding the treatment of British prisoners in Pakistani custody, which has involved the UK feeding questions to interrogators while turning a blind eye to the use of torture. This appears to be so prevalent that the Guardian has described it as "an official interrogation policy", but although it has involved horrendous treatment – Rangzieb Ahmed, later convicted of terrorism-related charges in the UK, claimed he had his fingernails pulled out by Pakistani torturers, and a medical student, who was subsequently released, stated that "after being tortured by Pakistani agents he was questioned by British intelligence officers" – it appears to be the first example of British agents, on the ground, leaving the room while abuse took place.
Above all, however, the circumstances in which Jamil Rahman was pressured to produce false confessions and to identify other "terror suspects" from photographs demonstrate the dangers inherent in a system in which the British intelligence services appear to be equating "actionable intelligence" with the fruits of coercion and, if not the use of torture, then the threat of torture.
The British government's mantra is that it does not support or condone the use of torture, but a troubling passage in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's recent report (pdf, p16), on human rights makes it clear that a loophole has been deliberately left open. After stating, "The use of intelligence possibly derived through torture presents a very real dilemma, given our unreserved condemnation of torture and our efforts to eradicate it," the report's authors added, "Where there is intelligence that bears on threats to life, we cannot reject it out of hand."
As the case of Jamil Rahman demonstrates, the fundamental problem with leaving the door to torture ajar is that it encourages that slim proviso to become a policy in and of itself. The circumstances in which appraisals of "intelligence possibly derived through torture" are required should be very small, but with the sidelining of the absolute prohibition on torture in the US-led "war on terror", both the US and the UK appear to have introduced policies in which the supposed "intelligence" has not, as in the past, arrived indirectly from the torture dungeons of brutal dictatorships, but has, at least partly, been engineered by British and American agents themselves.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2009/may/27/jamil-rahman-torture
They knew I was beaten and threatened': Briton to sue Jacqui Smith over MI5 torture claim
By Daniel Bates
Last updated at 2:01 AM on 27th May 2009
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Andy Worthington is a historian, writer and author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (2007) and two books on modern British social history
Outsourcing torture to foreign climesguardian.co.uk - 3 hours ago Binyam Mohamed, released from Guantánamo in February, is involved in a court case to establish that the British government knew of his CIA-sponsored torture ... Smith faces legal action over MI5 torture case This is London Britain's MI5 Faces Fresh Torture Allegations Over Jamil Rahman Free Internet Press UK faces legal action over torture claimsIrish Times - 8 hours ago A former civil servant is threatening to sue a British minister, saying British security agents colluded in his torture by Bangladeshi officers who held him ... |
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Outsourcing torture to foreign climes
| After stating, "The use of intelligence possibly derived through torture presents a very real dilemma, given our unreserved condemnation of torture and our efforts to eradicate it," the report's authors added, "Where there is intelligence that bears on threats to life, we cannot reject it out of hand." more by David Miliband - 3 hours ago - guardian.co.uk (5 occurrences) |
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