Suspects may have been tortured abroad: UK

LONDON: Senior British ministers said on Sunday they could not rule out that vital anti-terror information had been obtained through the torture of suspects abroad.

But Foreign Secretary David Miliband and Home Secretary Alan Johnson strongly denied allegations of British collusion in the abuse of terror suspects overseas.

However, it was impossible to eradicate all risk, they wrote in The Sunday Telegraph newspaper, as a panel of lawmakers warned the government that regularly using information gained through torture could be legally construed as complicity.

The article comes as British intelligence agencies face allegations of involvement in the questioning of terror suspects in countries such as Pakistan, including supplying questions for interrogators.

‘The UK firmly opposes torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment. This is not just about legal obligations. It is about our values as a nation,’ Miliband and Johnson wrote.

‘But there are difficult judgments and hard choices, and they need to be better understood.’ 

They said all the most serious plots and attacks in Britain had links abroad, so ‘intelligence from overseas is critical’. While the government could be sure how detainees held by British authorities had been treated, ‘we cannot have the same level of assurance when they are held by foreign governments, whose obligations may differ from our own.’ 

In its annual human rights report, the Commons’ Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) said it was ‘imperative’ that the government fulfilled its legal obligations to prevent torture and probe alleged incidents.

‘We further conclude that there is a risk that use of evidence which may have been obtained under torture on a regular basis, especially where it is not clear that protestations about mistreatment have elicited any change in behaviour by foreign intelligence services, could be construed as complicity in such behaviour,’ they said.

The committee acknowledged that using intelligence supplied by other countries which could avert a devastating terror attack but which may have been obtained through torture ‘raises profoundly difficult moral questions.’  

Lawmakers on the FAC singled out Britain’s close links with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) as a special worry in the report. ‘While the UK must, by necessity, maintain its relationship with Pakistani intelligence, we are very concerned by allegations that the nature of the relationship UK officials have with the ISI may have led them to be complicit in torture,’ the legislators said in their report.—Agencies