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Clegg: senior Labour ex-ministers should give evidence to UK torture inquiry

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Nick Clegg Q&A 12Last week came the revelations from the US Senate Intelligence Committee about the extent of the CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

It immediately promoted questions about what the then Labour Government knew about what was happening on the watch of its closest ally. Nick Clegg has called for senior ex-ministers to give evidence to Parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) on what they knew about torture conducted by UK or US intelligence agencies in Iraq or Afghanistan, as The Guardian reports:

The deputy prime minister said it was clear that the intelligence agencies should have disregarded any evidence from the Americans if it was obtained by torture. The ISC has said it will investigate allegations of British complicity once a police investigation has been completed. Clegg said a preliminary report by a panel led by Sir Peter Gibson looking into allegations of torture found no evidence of UK complicity in torture but raised many disturbing questions. He praised the chairman of the ISC, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, and added: “We should use the additional muscle given to the ISC to fully explore these murky events in the past. If people are found to have broken the law, the full weight of the law should come down on them without fear or favour, however operationally grand they are.” He noted there had been two cases of rendition through the British territory of Diego Garcia in 2002, which were confirmed to parliament in 2008.

He said: “Torture is wrong in any circumstances, there are no ifs and buts. You cannot as a free democratic society lower yourself to the barbaric standards of those who want to destroy our way of life. You cannot absolve yourself by knowingly using information that you know has been derived from treatment that is illegal or strictly contrary to our values.”


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