Seven years ago now, in January 2002, came the first shocking images of human beings in rows in aircraft, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic, much as other human beings had been carried in slave ships four hundred years earlier. The captor’s humiliation of these anonymous beings – unloaded at Guantánamo Bay, crouched in open cages in orange jumpsuits – was deliberately displayed. The watching world needed no knowledge of international humanitarian conventions to understand that what it was seeing was unlawful, since what is in fact the law precisely mirrors instinctive moral revulsion. The definitions of crimes against humanity, and war crimes, are not complex: ‘Grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 12 August 1949’, including ‘torture or inhuman treatment’; ‘wilfully causing great suffering, or serious injury to body or health’; ‘wilfully depriving a prisoner of war or other protected person of the rights of fair and regular trial; unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement.’ What the world could instantly see for itself in those images was that this was the trafficking of human beings. It was not a manifestation of the Geneva Conventions at work; it was neither deportation nor extradition: far worse, it was transportation from a world and to a world outside the reach of the law, and intended to remain so. In those two worlds, crimes against humanity were to be perpetrated, but, unlike the images of transportation, they were intended to remain for ever secret. That they have not is largely the result of chance.

Moments of major moral and political importance often come about accidentally if at all, and how they are resolved depends entirely on the sustaining of public attention. We are presented with such a moment now. It has come about in large part through the case of Binyam Mohamed, as in the High Court a battle still continues to discover even part of the truth about the relationship between British intelligence and the Americans and Moroccans, who for 18 months slashed the most intimate parts of his body with razors, burned him with boiling liquids, stretched his limbs causing unimaginable agony, and bombarded him with ferocious sound. At the same time, other evidence, too much to be swept aside, has been accumulated by dedicated journalists of men tortured just as horrifically by officials in Pakistan, who exchanged information with their British counterparts. Combined, these two sets of so far partial revelations have provided Britain with a moment of acute discomfort, sufficient to provoke the prime minister to announce the need for new guidelines for interrogations conducted by the intelligence services. This moment of official embarrassment should make us in Britain feel the greatest disquiet. We inhabit the most secretive of democracies, which has developed the most comprehensive of structures for hiding its misdeeds, shielding them always from view behind the curtain of ‘national security’. From here on in we should be aware of the game of hide and seek in which the government hopes to ensure that we should never find out its true culpability.

The opportunity for concealing the extent of our country’s collusion with those who have carried out the actual torture is increased by three factors: first, the nature of most of the techniques used (‘stealth methods’, so called); second, the choking powers of secrecy available to our government; and third, the haphazard way in which information about these matters emerges, when it emerges at all, which hampers our ability to ask the most basic questions.

We are now in the endgame of a cycle that started in late 2001. In the US the Obama administration, pushed by Freedom of Information Act inquiries, is releasing much of the most obscene evidence of what the previous administration consciously and specifically permitted. Storm clouds of retribution are gathering around those who have perpetrated crimes against humanity. What needs to concern us in Britain is this: while those first images put out by the US military in January 2002 gave a glimpse of what the US was doing, and prompted a seven-year public debate there about the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld redefinition of torture and abusive practices, here we remain almost completely in the dark about the part played by our intelligence services, and in turn by our Foreign Office and our Home Office and our ministers. There are no dramatic images to jolt us into comprehension and there is no release whatsoever of the information that US citizens claim it as their right to know. Yet we were there at those sites of unlawful confinement; in many cases it was we who told the Americans where to locate British nationals and British residents for rendition; it was we who provided information that could be and was used in conditions of torture; and it is we who have received the product.

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Tags: Guantanamo Bay, Human Rights, Omar Khadr, Torture

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