Brits show the way

What a contrast to see how the British are confronting their complicity in the torture of defenseless detainees, including the entirely admirable position of the both the Liberal Democrat and the Conservative opposition in denouncing the Labour government’s dismantling of centuries of British common law protections for the accused.

On the other hand, here in the U.S. the Republicans denounce Obama for even contemplating putting the accused on trial and not torturing them some more.

The latest episode is a public bitch-slapping match between Jonathan Evans [above], the head of Britain’s spy unit, MI5, and The Guardian newspaper for revealing the contents of a scathing judicial criticism of Her Majesty’s torturers. As usual, the brouhaha generated by the guilty is over whether the acts should be publicized, not the acts themselves.

Evans whined about ‘conspiracy theory and cariacature’ while the government’s second in command, Home Secretary Alan Johnson, denounced ‘groundless accusations’ and ‘ludicrous lies’. Just what you’d expect to hear as the truth comes tumbling out bit by bit.

The latest episode is typical of the slow ooze of the rot torture generates in a society, and we should not think the collusion among Congress and the Bush and Obama teams to suppress our version of it will escape the same process.

Not that it particularly matters, but the specific issue this time is whether or not British spies were present when Binyam Mohammed [below], a U.K. citizen no less, was being ‘interrogated’, in between getting his genitals sliced with a razor blade.

The denials are couched in carefully worded legalese, like this from Evans: ‘We did not practise mistreatment or torture and do not do so now, nor do we collude in torture or encourage others to torture on our behalf’. Of course, that depends on what you mean by ‘torture’, and Bush showed us how easily that inconvenient term is gotten around with the help of the infamous Yoo and Bybee memos.

There’s virtually no doubt that British MI5 agents were fully complicit with plenty of torture sessions, so all the indignant denials are just staving off the inevitable collapse. Here’s another prisoner, Moazzam Begg, recalling an experience similar to Mohamed’s:

After running the gauntlet of US soldiers punching and kicking me and dogs barking at me, I was forced to my knees, hooded and in shackles, with a gun pointed towards me.

When the hood was lifted, so, metaphorically, was the veil, and in front of me I saw British intelligence agents.

I remember very well when I was held—not just in Guantánamo, but also in Bagram and Kandahar—that British intelligence services were present at every leg of that journey. I knew one of them from the U.K. because he’d visited my house in Birmingham, so we already knew each other when I saw him again at Kandahar and Bagram.

Continued denials will just make the eventual flood of truth that much more humiliating. Britain today, us tomorrow.