MI5: are British agents complicit in torture?

"The intelligence services appear to be out to extinguish any criticism of their activity "

"Since the beginning of the so-called war on terror, many Britons have been appalled by the dirt)' tactics employed by American intelligence," said The Economist. Sadly, it has become increas­ingly clear that British spies have also been "complicit in torture, even if they have avoided turning the thumbscrews themselves". Last week, the Court of Appeal gave a devastating judgement in the case of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and interrogated by the CIA, with the help of an MI5 agent. The judges ordered the publication of seven paragraphs (summarising 42 CIA reports about him held by MI5) which the Government had tried to keep secret. The paragraphs revealed that Mohamed had been continuously deprived of sleep, shackled hand and foot, and threatened with the prospect of "disappearing" into a foreign prison - which caused him "significant mental stress and suffering". Crucially, said the FT, the judges found that this amounted, "at the very least, to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment", which is banned under the UN Convention against Torture - and that MI5 was well aware that it was happening. Worse still, part of the judgement, given by the Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, was struck out at the request of the Government's QC - because it suggested that MI5 does not respect human rights and had "deliberately misled" MPs about the incident. When the press reported the judge's comments, the Government reacted with fury: the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, claimed that attacking his officials gave "a propaganda weapon to our enemies"; Foreign Secretary David Miliband described the claim that our spies had colluded in torture as "disgraceful". All this "bullying" gives the impression "that the intelligence services are out to extinguish any criticism of their activity, no matter how senior the source". Nonsense, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph: the fact is that the criticisms are quite unjustified. Imagine that you are an MI5 agent in Pakistan, back in 2002, visiting a British resident held on suspicion of having been in an al-Qa'eda camp. You suspect he has been interrogated using illegal techniques. Do you therefore refuse to question him - passing up the chance to unearth information that might save British lives? Of course not. The Government didn't fight to keep these paragraphs secret because they revealed anything particularly horrific, said Sean O'Neill in The Times. They fought because of the "control principle" -"the doctrine that underpins international co-operation between intelligence agencies". If an agency shares secret information with a friendly power it does so "on the firm understanding" that its ally will not disclose it. If this rule is breached, intelligence will not be shared, and our spies will be denied a vital tool in the fight against terror. his case is not about torture, agreed The Daily Telegraph. It is about whether the "human rights" of a man like Mohamed are more important than our national security and our relationship with our chief ally: the Obama administration has said that it is "deeply disappointed" by the publication of the documents. "If the judicial establishment - egged on by the human-rights lobby - routinely thwarts the security services in their vital work, we must accept that the public's safety may well be compromised." That's quite wrong, said Richard Norton-Taylor in The Guardian. The judges didn't question the control principle. They simply said it was irrelevant here because the facts had already been made public by a US court hearing Mohamed's case, which accepted that he had been psychologically tortured, and had later had his genitals mutilated after being "rendered" to a Moroccan prison. Nor was MI5 merely a passive bystander in all this: it passed a list of 70 questions to the CIA during Mohamed's interrogation. Our secret services have also been accused of co-operating in the torture of nine other British terrorism suspects. Finally, MI5 did, as Neuberger argued, lie to MPs: in 2007 its officials told the Intelligence and Security Committee that it had no knowledge that Mohamed had been ill-treated; last week's revelations show this to be quite untrue. Instead of attacking our judges, the Government and its spies should put their own house in order, said The Times. "It is not the acknowledgement of misdeeds that tarnishes a country's reputation and gives succour to its enemies. It is that they happened in the first place, and the cover-up that seeks to pretend that they did not."