My colleagues and I at Reprieve are delighted that the attorney general has done the right thing and referred Binyam Mohamed's case to the director of public prosecutions.
Ever since the government referred the matter to the attorney general, there have been complaints about the appropriateness of such a move. It was a problem of "neither fish nor fowl". The attorney general was not the director of public prosecutions, nor was she an independent inquirer. Further, her inquiry did not seem to be moving fast. Reprieve, which probably has more documents on this case than any other organisation, except possibly the intelligence services, offered Baroness Scotland access to those documents in December. To date, she has still not requested to see any of those documents.
So, it is extremely welcome that she is now handing the matter over to the DPP and the police. Indeed, it is right ? the British intelligence services were complicit in Binyam's torture and such a serious case should be referred to the DPP, so that the police can investigate and the DPP can consider whether or not prosecution is needed.
Any investigation will need to have access to classified documents. Central to the inquiry will be those referred to by the British court, which comprise the correspondence between the US and UK intelligence services. These will be vital for any prosecution to establish the requisite knowledge on the part of the UK intelligence services. These documents include the lists of questions the UK intelligence services sent to the CIA to be put to Binyam after they knew that he had vanished from the jail in Pakistan.
It is, above all, crucial that the police investigation has proper scope. As Binyam himself says, we shouldn't just blame the "little guys". We believe that Agent B and his direct superiors were involved in illegal behaviour, but the investigation should not stop there. It seems very likely that Agent B was acting with authorisation and the question must be how far up the line that authorisation went, both in the UK and the US. Agent B must not be the scapegoat: if his actions were sanctioned, the person at the top of the chain of command who sanctioned those actions must be held responsible and accountable. For the investigation to be meaningful, questions will need to be asked about who knew about the intelligence services' questioning of Binyam.
And this does not remove the need for an independent review of the government's conduct generally in the "war on terror". The investigation of this individual case will not cover the question of whether or not the government has been involved in the systematic rendition and abuse of prisoners. One only has to look at the way in which parliament has been misled on this ? first, in relation to whether or not Diego Garcia was used to enable rendition, and second, the admission from Defence Secretary Hutton that British forces were involved in the rendition of prisoners from Afghanistan to Iraq. An independent inquiry is necessary to bring all of this into the open and restore confidence in this government.
Finally, if it is the case that highly-placed UK and US personnel were also complicit in Binyam's torture, there is the question of what happens then. Will those people be prosecuted? Will the US personnel be extradited to the UK for prosecution? This situation could be an embarrassing illustration of the weakness of our extradition treaty with the US. Under that treaty, we are allowing British national Gary McKinnon to be extradited to the US for hacking into the Pentagon looking for UFOs. It is somewhat unpalatable that the same treaty will very likely not allow US personnel guilty of war crimes to be extradited to the UK.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/26/binyam-mohamed-torture
