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Counter-Terrorism Bill

Like the noble Lord, I believe that the members of the security and intelligence services, for whom I do not speak, would be in sympathy with the thinking and tenor of the amendment. We all abhor torture. Some of what has now become apparent about its use since 9/11, in particular, was not apparent at the time. That has required the intelligence and security services to rethink how they do a number of things, because of the possibility of torture as a result of their inquiries, for example. That is a serious issue that causes tremendous concern among my former colleagues. Dealing with it is a practical point. It may help the Committee in thinking about the issue if I pick up the point made by the Minister about scale. If we receive a piece of information from an unnamed country that we suspect—or, indeed, know—to have practised torture once a week or once a fortnight, it becomes almost impossible to get the sort of assurances required to ascertain exactly how that information was obtained and, as far as possible, to ensure that it was not obtained by torture, given that we have thousands of pieces of information a week. So, rather than dealing with each specific piece of information, it is essential to have, as exist, policies designed to be compatible with the law and ethically defensible to deal with countries that we know or suspect of using torture. We can only approach this in that generic fashion, because to do it specifically, case by case, would lead us to the bureaucratic problems to which the Minister referred. I assure the Committee that, of the many issues that concerned me when I was director-general of the service, the possible use of torture by our allies and its effect on the morale of my staff was my top concern.