And what was the reason the British government faced this court case? Why, the ex-Guantanamo inmates claimed British complicity with torture. Not that the British committed torture, but that they were complicit with it. They claim that the UK fed information and questions to their interrogators, or gave information to the CIA so it could arrest British suspects overseas where they were tortured. What was the torture to which they were subjected in Guantanamo and elsewhere? Well, there are a lot of claims but nothing, other than in three cases overall at Guantanamo, has ever been convincingly proved to be anything other than claims made by terrorist suspects. Those three were water-boarded. Is water boarding torture? For sure, it is obviously exceptionally unpleasant and traumatic. But torture? Water-boarding has been (at least in the recent past) part of the training undergone by certain American recruits to the military to enable them to resist interrogation. Were those American recruits therefore tortured by the American military? If so, where were the human rights cases brought on their behalf in respect of such a claim? Why did no-one even think twice about it until Guantanamo? Or does waterboarding only become torture when it is applied by Americans to their own captured suspects? Were any of these al Qaeda suspects treated harshly? Possibly; in the three water-boarded cases, certainly. Is a measure of ill-treatment short of torture ever justified if this prevents the mass murder of possibly hundreds or even thousands of innocent civilians? Yes. Do countries under threat sometimes have to enter a morally grey area in order to protect the lives of their people? Yes. To argue that this is never justified is a morally degraded position. It is effectively to say that the well-being of a handful of jihadi supporters is more important than protecting countless numbers of innocent people from being murdered. It is to privilege the aggressor over his victims. What is the effect of this settlement? Catastrophic. Despite the fact that there is no admission of any liability by the British government, that is how it is already being presented by al Qaeda (and if these guys really aren't anything to do with them, why are the jihadis so jubilant?). Jihad is now apparently a means of milking the British taxpayer. More recruits will now flock to the jihad on the basis that Britain is demonstrably crumbling. This decision therefore makes the murder of more innocents more likely. How did the British government get itself into such a ridiculous position of having to pay legal ‘protection’ money to terrorist suspects in order to avoid the greater calamity of compromising invaluable intelligence? Because of ‘human rights’ law and the industry of western ‘human rights’ lawyers and activists, who in their unceasing vendetta against Britain and America on behalf of Islamic extremists seeking to damn the west as moral degenerates have become the jihad’s fifth column acting against the west. Is it possible to get a fair hearing for such arguments in Britain today? No. Will the Cameron government extricate Britain from the grip of ‘human rights’ law which is now causing country after country in Europe to act against its national interests and compromise the security of its citizens? No. During the Second World War, was Britain more protective of the ‘civil liberties’ of those it deemed to be its actual or potential enemies on the basis that otherwise it would be giving its enemies a moral victory? No; it locked them up without trial to prevent its enemies from achieving an actual victory. Would Britain have won that war had the ‘human rights’ industry been doing to the British government and military then what it is doing now? No. Does the fact that we are now fighting a very different kind of war mean that this one is any less lethal to western society? No. Will Britain survive as a recognisably western liberal democracy if it continues down this path? No. Britain on its knees, with a human rights noose round its neck
It is hard to overstate how much of a disaster for both Britain and the west is the British government’s decision – all but buried under yesterday’s Royal wedding media hysteria – to award an unspecified sum of compensation, estimated variously between £10 million and £30 million, to 16 former detainees of Guantánamo Bay to avoid running up a £50 million legal bill if their cases went to court, and to avoid the security service being forced to compromise its intelligence sources.
Thursday, 18 November 2010
melanie phillips
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