properly, or often not know at all.
Since the end of the Cold War, there has been unprecedented worldwide monitoring of man’s propensity to torture, and yet far from abating, its use has burgeoned. The explanation of how this has come about is to be found in the dual strategies upon which the monitoring of torture depends; the first, exposing it to public condemnation through the recording and publication of unchallengeable research, and the second, where torture has been conducted, holding state agents responsible. The first has spurred torturers to adopt the ‘lesser’ techniques, harder to detect and document. The second has encouraged governments to seek acceptance of their methods from a public quick to condemn those considered to be soft on terrorism. In this country, in fact, the government hardly needs such acceptance, since here the additional and crucial factor is that the public is unlikely to be given sufficient information to trigger revulsion.
Whether we will in this country ever know the full extent of British participation in criminal acts of the utmost seriousness should be a burning issue. We should not take it for granted that court cases or a judicial inquiry will tell us what we need to know about the complicity of our government in crimes against humanity. The Baha Mousa inquiry into the activities of the British military in Iraq will not touch on the interaction of the British state with the US or the intelligence services, or with any torturing foreign state. Instead, the government will claim, as it does with ever greater frequency, that any issue relating to the intelligence services, or to the conduct of diplomatic relationships, should be confined entirely to special courts, or the evidence heard in large part in secret. The use of these procedures expands daily.
This is not the way that the most basic principles of democratic responsibility and due process should be exercised even in the most mundane of circumstances; even less so when the issues are of such moral seriousness and public importance. To understand how we have come to this pass, graver than that in any other comparable democracy, we need first to understand how secrecy has come to be justified by successive governments, and to understand how the use of obfuscatory language has taken the place of informed democratic debate.
We still live, in the twenty-first century, in a world whose political configuration is that of the nation state. For those exercising political power, the issue of a nation’s security, its ‘national security’, is of immense importance. The state is invariably referred to as a source of the security necessary for protection against threats from others, or from internal violence, and this idea is shared, by and large, by its population. There may be disagreement about the existence or gravity of any alleged threat and the appropriate response to it, but the concept of the state as the protector and guarantor of security is seldom doubted. ‘Security’ is such a dramatic yet ill-defined concept that those in power are able to muzzle criticism and prevent debate by invoking it and by claiming to possess vital knowledge (which cannot, of course, be safely revealed) to support their policies or their actions. Those in power draw on traditions of deference and nonpartisanship when it comes to national security, allowing governments to avoid provision of any reasoned justification when it is said to be at stake. There is therefore a dangerous circularity to the entire process. Deference is fed in part by ignorance, and ignorance is fed in turn by claims that secrecy is essential. The public receives only the barest of justifications, to be taken on trust, while the government machine ignores or short-circuits normal democratic processes.
The language used is itself a critical contributing factor. After the Second World War the US was the first nation to transform traditional terminology, moving from ‘defense’ to ‘national security’ as the guiding ethos of its foreign policy, a conscious choice of words intended to reflect the expansion of the US’s desired role in world affairs, conflating a myriad different political, economic and military factors so that developments elsewhere in the world could automatically be construed as having a direct impact on the US’s vital national interests. Every development the world over came to be perceived as potentially crucial, an unfavourable turn of events anywhere endangering the United States. American foreign policy goals came to be translated into issues of national survival, and the potential threats without limit.
A similar mindset came to be consolidated in Britain by a quite separate route. In the wake of the Second World War the members of the Council of Europe, then only a few nations, committed themselves to a treaty, the European Convention on Human Rights, which provided for individual petition and was designed to give teeth to the enforcement of those rights. Several rights had caveats attached to them in case of exceptional circumstances, one of which was ‘national security’. This was a new term in Europe: the phrase used by Britain and France until then had been ‘defence of the realm’, which reflected the most extreme threat a nation might face—that is, war. The British lawyers responsible for drafting the European Convention had been affected, it would seem, by the new postwar US conception, and adopted it wholesale.
While it may be that we are too far down the road to reclaim the old terminology, we should nevertheless insist on confining the application of the term ‘national security’ to core principles, including the protection of democracies from foreign invasion or manipulation, i.e. the ability to defend nation-states against military attack. In the minds of many people, however, and particularly in abbreviated media discussion, a further conceptual leap has taken place, so that secrecy and national security have now come to be seen as synonymous.
We allowed this state of affairs to come about through sheer neglect. Britain was the last of the parliamentary democracies to put any of its security and intelligence agencies on a statutory footing, and even into the 1990s it obstinately maintained the extraordinary fiction that MI6 did not exist. When belatedly, in the mid-1990s, there was talk of bringing the three intelligence services, MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, into a structure of accountability, a limited degree of oversight was given to a Parliamentary Committee on Intelligence and Security. But such parliamentary debates as there were failed to address fundamental questions, in particular those of limitation: what kinds of conduct do we as a society wish to declare off-limits? There has never been any sign in this country that any government has understood the need to talk through the issues involved, let alone promote public debate. So far as standards or controls were concerned, it was argued at the time that these were inappropriate and unnecessary because the organisations were controlled by their parent departments in ministries and required approval by ministers for all contentious actions.
Although the resulting legislation was in a narrow legal sense intended to bring the intelligence services onto a statutory footing, the wider political dimension was that an opportunity was there—it was missed—for the law to provide a primary statement about how our society believed its international dealings in particular ought to be conducted.
The Parliamentary Committee itself, a very British affair composed of high-ranking members of the House of Commons and House of Lords who had been security cleared, was left without any coherent brief in relation to oversight and was explicitly banned from receiving information about particular operations. Its primary concerns related to finance and administration. Yet, in the face of what in any questioning society might threaten the collapse of a government, it is this committee, operating as it does on such a narrow remit within an ethos of secrecy, that has been tasked by the prime minister with reordering the ethical basis of the intelligence agencies, seemingly without any comprehension on his part of the scale of what is required. This, it seems, is intended to act as our national catharsis. Yet we are unlikely to find out any meaningful detail. It is an irony that the death of Baha Mousa, killed by the military in a war zone, was nevertheless considered in open court martial.
If we look carefully there is sufficient evidence that British foreign policy, and indeed its domestic policy, have for many years been conducted in a way that is in violation not only of our own law and of international law, but which, far worse, has led us to be complicit in torture and in the commission of internationally prohibited crimes against humanity. No more serious circumstance could come to pass. At present, instances are explained away—when they briefly, accidentally come into view—as mere blips. An individual officer, for example, may not have been properly
