Paying 'terror suspects' millions

The Guantanamo saga simply gets ever more bizarre. Now we have a court in New York – in the first ever US civilian trial of a Guantanamo prisoner – finding the accused not guilty of 284 of 285 charges against him. Needless to say, the one charge he was found guilty of carries a potential life sentence. He is appealing.

One of the key US Government witnesses was banned from the court because his evidence had been extracted from the accused Tanzanian, Ahmed Ghailani, “under duress”. Does that mean “torture”?

Meanwhile we have the ever stranger situation this side of the Atlantic. Twelve men the ‘security establishment’ regard as “terrorists”, whom they deny have ever been tortured, are being paid millions of pounds by the UK Government for damage they say they suffered as a result of being both “rendered” and “tortured” in assorted countries across the world.

You also have the Director of Public Prosecutions who says he cannot charge Witness B (who was present during the interrogation of one of these soon to be millionaire terrorist suspects whilst he was allegedly tortured) because of lack of enough evidence to convict.

Is this business as usual? The inquiry into whether these men actually WERE tortured cannot start until ALL have accepted these pay outs, and one outstanding criminal case is complete. That inquiry itself is to be presided over by the only judge in the UK who actually had legal oversight of what agents, like witness B, were doing during the period in which torture is alleged.

There will perhaps be some understanding for the head of M15 who went so speedily to his website to rejoice at the sparing of his man.

Home Office sources talk of the element of panic and lack of intelligence inside the secret services in the aftermath of 9/11, and 7/7.  Was this what allowed a regime in which it seems there was an alleged  culture of “anything goes” so long as “life saving information” could be extracted. A situation that appears perilously close to that in George Bush’s Decision Points.

Ultimately the sums to be paid are SO large, that there remains a suspicion that something truly dastardly did indeed transpire and that it is better to pay up right now than face the slow drip drip of public disclosure from an awkward series of court cases over an agonising period of years.

So it has been left to nice Ken Clarke – the liberal Conservative coalition Justice Minster to carry the can on the very day of the announcement of the Royal Wedding, conveniently ensuring the least possible public scrutiny of what he was talking about.