---

Intelligence and Security Committee

Enhanced interrogation, coercive interrogation—various phrases were used to try to avoid saying the dreaded word "torture". However, when there is waterboarding and a series of other such practices and when it is stated that as long as permanent, irreversible physical damage to the person concerned is not created, such behaviour does not constitute torture, that is an absurd use of language and they are matters of some alarm. As my right hon. Friend the Member for East Hampshire and others have said, it is a matter of huge satisfaction and relief that there is not the slightest suggestion from any quarter that employees of this country's agencies have ever tortured anyone or carried out cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. There is no suggestion either that they have asked for that to be done by other people, but the ISC report nevertheless sets out two problems identified by the documents that were eventually released in the case of Binyam Mohamed. The first was that the UK agencies had information that Binyam Mohamed had been subject to extreme sleep deprivation. That was obviously a matter of some concern, but the more important and disturbing problem is revealed in paragraph 152 of the report. Although the UK agencies had received the information about Mr. Mohamed, the Committee states:""There is no record that the Security Service took any action on receipt of this information"." However, the report goes on to say not only that the service""continued to provide US liaison with background information"" but that it provided the US authorities with questions that it wished""to be put to Mr. Mohamed, up until April 2003"—" that is, the following year. If the report is correct, it suggests that our security services were aware that Mr. Mohamed had been subject to what presumably would be described as cruel and degrading treatment but that it was willing to ask for questions to be put to him, even though it did not know that the treatment had been concluded. So far as the security services knew, the treatment might have been continuing: if it was, then there is a case to answer with regard to the question of complicity. I very much hope that those are not the facts of the situation, but they would be consistent with the ISC report.