And deeply disturbing questions for Red Ed’s brother
Nothing could be clearer. David Miliband, then Labour’s Foreign Secretary, laying claim to the moral high ground, proclaiming: ‘i abhor anything that constitutes torture. Waterboarding, it’s perfectly clear to me it is torture.
‘i never supported extraordinary rendition to torture, always said that guantanamo should be closed. there is no clash of ideals and pragmatism there.’
his uncompromising comments came in an interview in new Statesman magazine in 2009.
With Labour trailing in the polls and likely to lose the election that was due the following year and with the party subsequently expected to chose a new leader, Miliband was attempting to burnish his leadership credentials and pose as a world statesman.
the truth is that those pious words turned out to be as hollow as his younger brother Ed’s vow of family loyalty as he ruthlessly knifed David and stood for the leadership himself.
For exactly one year after David Miliband’s ‘i abhor torture’ interview, he was exposed as being behind a cover-up of one of the most shameful episodes in new Labour’s rule — Britain’s secret involvement in the torture of terror suspects overseas.
Miliband had tried to use the court system over a period of six months to block publication of the fact that Mi5 had connived in the torture of one suspect, Binyam Mohamed, a former British resident who had been detained in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of having attended an al-Qaeda training camp.
three times, Miliband went to courts to obtain Public interest immunity certificates ( which exclude official documents from public view) to try to keep the truth secret about his torture in Morocco. in the process of concealing Mi5’s dirty secrets, the Foreign office ran up a taxpayer-funded legal bill of £213,000.
But Miliband failed. in a landmark ruling in February 2010, the Court of Appeal effectively accused Mi5 of complicity in torture and a culture of disregarding human rights.
So what was the deeply compromised Miliband trying to conceal?
the court documents said that Binyam Mohamed had been subjected to ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities’, in which the British intelligence services had been complicit. the documents also said he was ‘intentionally subjected to continuous sleep deprivation. the effects of the sleep deprivation were carefully observed’. Mohammed was awarded £1 million compensation — a clear sign of the Establishment’s guilt.
it must be said that Mr Miliband was only trying to cover up something that had occurred mostly in 2002, under a previous Labour Foreign Secretary.
But the court’s findings had made public the brutal methods deployed by the Americans, with the full knowledge of Mi5, which went against a commitment made by the then British government at the height of the Ulster troubles that banned torture techniques such as subjecting hooded prisoners to beatings, food and sleep deprivation, and exposure to very loud noise for prolonged periods.
Among arguments about torture heard by the court was that ‘if it had been administered on behalf of the UK, it would clearly have been a breach of the undertaking given by the UK in 1972.’
Following the Court of Appeal ruling, a shame-faced Miliband had to go to the Commons and grovel, saying he had gone to court on a principle that was ‘fundamental to national security’.
how ironic that the man who was Prime Minister at the time of this appalling treatment of a terror suspect was tony Blair, who had spoken of war as being a moral crusade. this is the same man whose first Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, had proclaimed the party’s commitment to an ‘ethical’ foreign policy. this is the same man who converted to Catholicism and who whose current job — among many other lucrative posts — is as a peace envoy.
And what about his one-time Labour colleague, David Miliband?
What is clear is that he was egged on by Downing Street officials, who realised that the continuing stench over the iraq war was damaging Prime Minister gordon Brown’s election prospects.
Miliband sent the U.S. State Department a stream of letters and emails, pleading with the Washington administration to back him and prevent the public release of the documents, whose contents could deeply damage the special relationship between the two countries on intelligencegathering. indeed, so serious were Miliband’s concerns that he sent his top legal adviser, Daniel Bethlehem QC, to Washington.
next, Miliband raised the political temperature by attacking ‘irresponsible judges’, claiming that if they authorised the release of the information, they would be giving ‘succour to the country’s enemies’.
Even after losing his legal battle, he rejected the chance, during his ill-fated leadership campaign, to come clean. instead, he persisted in his denials about Labour’s role in barbaric torture.
Asked in a BBC interview by Andrew neil if he was aware that Mi5 had provided questions for the CiA to put to terrorist suspects who were being tortured, he replied: ‘We don’t have evidence of that.’
Yet the truth is that, as Foreign Secretary, he submitted documents to the court which showed the reverse was true. they confirmed that British intelligence was involved in questioning terror suspects, including Binyam Mohamed.
Surely, a politician with more moral scruples would have put public duty above all else and would have set up an inquiry into the allegations that at least 15 British nationals or residents claimed to have been tortured with the complicity, knowledge and sometimes even in the presence of British intelligence officers?
to this day, Miliband’s supporters insist that he was not fully aware of the details of the Americans’ torture activities.
But tory MP David Davis is scathing about their refusal to accept the truth, saying that it was irresponsible to suggest that the evidence was a threat to national security. ‘he is guilty of a cover-up,’ he says.
the irony is that David Miliband now runs an international human rights charity. As director of the international Rescue Committee, he earns £300,000 a year.
one reason he was given the job was because of his top- l evel political contacts as a former British Foreign Secretary.
Working from an office in new York, Miliband was recently praised by former U.S. president Bill Clinton as ‘one of the ablest, most creative public servants of our time’. Last month, he schmoozed with Sting, one of the world’s most celebrated pop stars, and Star trek actor Sir Patrick Stewart, another Labour luvvie, at a gala dinner at the Waldorf Astoria in new York.
Following the appalling revelations by the Senate committee, will new York’s smart set be so keen to be seen with David Miliband when they learn about his own shameful role in trying to cover it up?