MI5 accused of colluding in torture of terrorist suspects

When did we sink so low? When did our abhorrence of torture become so worn out that it became a practice which we outsourced? Or, indeed, in the case of the US, a practice which they indulged in themselves and which the president felt able to publicly boast of?

A number of British terrorism suspects are claiming that MI5 outsourced their torture to the infamous Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, in an attempt to obtain information to secure the conviction of al Qaeda suspects.

Tayab Ali, a London-based lawyer for two of the men, said: "I am left with no doubt that, at the very worst, the British Security Service instigates the illegal detention and torture of British citizens, and at the very best turns a blind eye to torture."

One man from Manchester says that in 2006 he was beaten, whipped, deprived of sleep and had three fingernails slowly extracted by ISI agents at the Rawalpindi centre before being interrogated by two MI5 officers. A number of his alleged associates were questioned in Manchester at the same time and two were subsequently charged. This man's lawyers say his fingernails were missing when they were eventually allowed to see him, more than a year after he was first detained. They say they have pathology reports that prove the nails were forcibly removed.

A second man, from Luton, Bedfordshire, alleges that two years earlier he was whipped, suspended by his wrists and beaten, and threatened with an electric drill, possibly at the same torture centre. His interrogation was coordinated with the questioning of several associates at Paddington Green police station, west London, and the questioning of a further suspect in Canada.

MI5 does not dispute questioning him several times during his 10 months' detention in Pakistan.

One would suspect that normally we could claim that we had no idea what the Pakistani authorities were doing to suspects they held in their facilities, however, in this case that theory does not appear to hold water.

MI5 is thought to be considering a defence based on its officers' insistence that they had no reason to know that the ISI might have been torturing the men - a position that Pakistani lawyers and human rights activists in Pakistan and the UK say beggars belief. Even a high-ranking Scotland Yard counter-terrorism detective has conceded privately that there is little doubt that the Luton man was tortured.

In the US, the CIA were acting under the dubious legal authority granted by Yoo's torture memos, but there is no such equivalent here in the UK.

Under the Criminal Justice Act 1988 it is an offence for British officials to instigate or consent to the inflicting of "severe pain or suffering" on any person, anywhere in the world, or even to acquiesce in such treatment. Any such offence could be punished by life imprisonment.

Why are we doing these things? Why, since 9-11, has our moral compass become so skewered that we are now indulging in actions which we have always abhorred?

There are some who would argue that the world changed on 9-11, but that's a false argument. Yes, we learned that there were people out there who would like to kill many of us, but in any "war of civilisation" surely we do not defend our values by throwing them away at the first opportunity? For, by engaging in actions which we have previously defined as immoral and uncivilised, aren't we saying that our values system was false?

Aren't we becoming the very thing which we claim to despise? Or is our torture somehow honourable because we outsource it?

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Tags: MI5, Torture, Pakistan