In the last few days an overwhelming amount of evidence has come to light about the complicity of British intelligence officers, and the British government, in the torture of terror suspects.
Reporting in The Guardian, Ian Cobain has gathered a dossier of case studies and reports that support the account given to Spectacle by Omar Deghayes, a former Guantanamo detainee.
Omar Deghayes told Spectacle that he was visited numerous times by British intelligence officers while being tortured in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In a striking parallel to a case mentioned by Ian Cobain, Omar was first visited by an officer called ‘Andrew’.
From The Guardian:
‘Jamil Rahman, a British citizen from south Wales, was detained in his wife’s family’s village in northern Bangladesh in December 2005 and says he was tortured by Bangladeshi intelligence agents before being questioned by two MI5 officers who called themselves Liam and Andrew.’
The first thing Omar said to ‘Andrew’ was he was a British citizen, he then asked why the British were colluding with his maltreatment. Later on when Omar was moved to Bagram in Afghanistan, he says his torturers were given false information by British intelligence officers to further intimidate him. Furthermore the British interrogated him themselves in an area of the prison where they could have clearly seen prisoners being maltreated.
This claim has now been supported by Pakistani intelligence officials who told New York based Human Rights Watch that not only were British Intelligence agents aware of torture but they were ‘grateful’ for it.
Surely it is time to stop referring to ‘claims’ of torture and admit that British officers directly used torture to gather ‘information’ from ‘terror’ suspects. Regardless whether or not they physically carried out the torture themselves this is still a crime against humanity.
To watch an edit of Omar’s torture testimony please visit Spectacle’s Guantanamo Project Page
To watch other footage from Spectacle’s Guantanamo project please visit our Archive
