UK Complicity In Torture

It is now more than six years since the Guardian first reported indications of complicity, when it found that CIA flights were refuelling at British airports as they flew prisoners across the world to countries where torture was used. The reports marked the beginning of a prolonged confrontation between the rule of law and the war on terror, one that remains unresolved. After the supreme court ruled last July that closed hearings, where defendants would not be entitled to know the evidence against them, were a breach of a fundamental common law right, it seems in the courts the rule of law has triumphed. But in the murky politics of the war on terror, a sustained rearguard action by the security and intelligence services, in alliance with civilian Whitehall itself, is perilously close to gaining the upper hand. The two questions Gibson's inquiry had to answer were whether British agencies knowingly and therefore illegally returned suspects to countries where they might be tortured, and whether politicians – expressly, the foreign secretaries at the time, Jack Straw and David Miliband – knew about it, the enormity of which could destroy a career. Full details.