Blair and some of our spooks sank perilously close to the barbarism of those who want to destroy our civilisation

TORTURE in this country was outlawed by the Long Parliament in 1640. Though it has undoubtedly been used on many occasions since then, it has remained illegal.

Before the First Gulf War, Margaret Thatcher, in the dying days of her prime ministership, did something rather magnificent. The security services were contemplating a little judicious use of torture. She disappointed them by her instruction ‘not to use any intelligence that might have come from torture’.

Alas, this precious principle was recklessly jettisoned by the Blair government in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Centre in September 2001, and the creation, four months later, of a detention centre at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, where suspected terrorists were held without trial, and often tortured.

There is no evidence that British intelligence officers personally carried out torture in the military base at Guantanamo or elsewhere. But it seems certain they were complicit in torture. And yet none of them, or their political masters, have yet been held to account. It is doubtful they ever will be.

Believe me, torture at Guantanamo Bay did mean torture. In 2014, a U.S. Senate report described the inhuman interrogation techniques practised by the CIA.

Some 119 prisoners were subjected to beatings, waterboarding, rectal feeding and being hung on chains. One detainee, chained half-naked to the floor, died of hypothermia.

This is not how decent, law-abiding governments behave. Nor do they lock up prisoners for years without trial. One such person was held at Guantanamo for 13 years in a case of mistaken identity.

Such is the background to the story in yesterday’s Mail that a former British inmate of Guantanamo Bay called Ronald Fiddler ( his adopted name was Jamal alHarith) has blown himself up in a suicide bomb attack on an Iraqi army base on behalf of the murderous Islamic State.

Not only that. This terrorist had been paid a reported £1 million of taxpayers’ money in compensation by the Tory-led Coalition government for being held at Guantanamo bay.

SENSIBLE

people will ask how this man was so far from being on the radar of the security services that he was able to hop on a plane and join ISIS. There must be an investigation into how this happened.

But the really crucial question concerns the reasons behind his compensation. Moreover, it wasn’t only Fiddler on the receiving end of government largesse. Some 16 British citizens are said to have received up to £20 million between them for being imprisoned without trial at Guantanamo.

Many of these former detainees claimed they were victims of kidnap and torture, and threatened to sue the Government. They also alleged that our spies were complicit in the brutal treatment meted out at the U.S. military base.

For example, Shaker Aamer, the last British inmate of Guantanamo released in 2015 after a campaign by this newspaper, claims a British intelligence officer was present when his head was repeatedly beaten against a wall by American interrogators. He also says he was questioned by two of our intelligence officers.

Aamer, by the way, was held for 14 years at Guantanamo without trial, often in solitary confinement. He plausibly alleges that he was repeatedly tortured and beaten. Isn’t this an offence to the civilised values which we claim to uphold?

In paying off former inmates, the Cameron government may well have been hoping that any collaboration of British intelligence officers in torture would never come to light. It was trying to head off a possible embarrassment, and used public money for that purpose.

You may ask: why were Cameron and Co so anxious to protect the Blair government over its association with torture, which, I repeat, is contrary to British law? The answer is that governments come and go, but the security Establishment does not change.

So it was that although David Cameron set up an official inquiry in 2010 into whether our intelligence services had been complicit in torture, it was kicked into the long grass.

Sir Peter Gibson, a High Court judge, was appointed to head the inquiry. Although £1.4 million of public money was spent, no witnesses were interviewed. It was suspended so as not to clash with a criminal inquiry by the police, and then killed off by Cameron.

To his credit, Sir Peter did manage to publish an interim report which found that MI6 agents had not properly raised concerns about sleep deprivation and water-boarding for fear of offending our U.S. allies.

Now the only body still remotely interested in the matter is Parliament’s secretive Intelligence and Security Committee chaired by the dusty and ultra-cautious lawyer and Tory MP, Dominic Grieve.

There is no indication when this shadowy committee will report. I’d say the chances of it establishing that British agents were complicit in torture — far less of condemning them — are close to zero.

How illuminating that when a few rogue journalists were guilty of phone- hacking, Cameron ordered a judge-led inquiry under oath into the ethics of the Press. Yet when British spies are accused of being present during torture, the victims are paid off, and an official inquiry is buried.

There is one small, remaining chance that Tony Blair and Jack Straw — Foreign Secretary, responsible for MI6 between 2001 and 2006 — will be finally forced to face the music.

ALIBYAN dissident called Abdel Hakim Belhaj convincingly alleges that he and his pregnant wife were kidnapped in Bangkok in 2004 with the connivance of British intelligence, and flown to Libya and into the clutches of the brutal dictator Col Gaddafi.

This appears to have been an instance of so- called extraordinary rendition, which Mr Straw and other members of the Blair government have repeatedly insisted never took place. Belhaj was tortured for years and kept in an isolation cell.

The Government has tried to buy him off, but Belhaj won’t be silenced. He doesn’t want money. He wants an apology — from Mr Straw and Sir Mark Allen, a former head of counterterrorism at MI6, who wrote to his Libyan opposite number that delivering Belhaj was ‘the least we could do for you’.

Last month the Supreme Court gave Belhaj leave to sue the Government over his extraordinary rendition. If the case goes ahead, Mr Straw and Sir Mark Allen could be called as witnesses. But will it? Might the authorities contrive to buy off Belhaj, or ensure that evidence is heard in private?

One way and another, a curtain has been drawn over a shaming passage in our recent history. The chief miscreant — more at fault than Mr Straw or Sir Mark Allen or even our misguided intelligence services — was the hysterical prime minister who not only defended Guantanamo, but took advantage of its dark practices.

Yesterday Tony Blair made a fuss about a headline in Mail Online — this newspaper’s sister website which has its own independent editor — after it inaccurately accused the Blair government of being behind the £1 million pay out to jihadist Ronald Fiddler. Blair also attacked the Mail because it had supported the release of British Guantanamo inmates.

But it did so because the detention centre was an abomination, where suspects were imprisoned without trial. And there were, even then, allegations of torture. There was never a suggestion on the part of this newspaper that any or all of them were innocent, only that as British citizens they deserved a fair trial in a properly constituted court of law.

Even if Blair is never held to account by an official report, I believe history will judge that he and some members of the security services lost their moral compass, and sank perilously close to the barbaric level of those who want to destroy our civilisation.