The British governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been shockingly complicit with the Bush administration both in using, encouraging, and facilitating torture, as well as in helping to cover up the traces. Some CIA torture flights passed through the UK, and British-controlled Diego Garcia has served as one of the primary staging grounds for those flights and itself is one of the network of 'black sites'. Indeed MI5 agents have arranged the arrest of men who ended up at Guantanamo, and taken part in interviews there - as for example in the case of Bisher al Rawi.

In other words, Tony Blair fully integrated the UK into Bush's torture regime. That's made even clearer in a new parliamentary report just published in Britain. The Joint Committee on Human Rights has been investigating the torture and murder of Baha Musa in Iraq in 2003. Musa was beaten and suffocated.

The Committeee found that top military officials misled it when they claimed that Bush-style "conditioning techniques" used by the British military had not been approved for interrogations in Iraq. Such techniques (e.g. hooding, sleep deprivation, and stress positions) were prohibited by law more than 30 years ago. Since 2004 UK military officials have pled the few bad apples defense, both in their own internal review and in testimony to Parliament.

[In 2004] Adam Ingram, the armed forces minister, and Lieutenant General Robin Brims, Commander Field Army in 2006, had told the Joint Committee on Human Rights that hooding and sleep deprivation were forbidden. But the committee said the assurances appeared to be false, and not all troops had known these and other "conditioning techniques" were banned.

Neither man has explained to Parliament why they lied. The Independent adds:

A scathing report from the Joint Human Rights Committee (JHRC) warns that the use of "coercive interrogation techniques" may have been officially sanctioned, despite assurances that troops knew they were outlawed... The JHRC report also found that the use of hooding and stress positioning by 1 Queen's Lancashire Regiment in 2003 was based on legal advice received from brigade headquarters. It claims that, at least until the Baha Mousa case came to light, the prohibition on the use of conditioning techniques "was not as clearly articulated to troops in Iraq as it might, and indeed should, have been".

Legal advice from the military chain of command authorizing torture. How familiar.

Phil Shiner, of Public Interest Lawyers, said: "We are meant to believe that it is just a few bad apples, but the evidence from courts martial and other cases shows that nothing could be further from the truth."

The report also finds that...

...even at the start of 2008 an official army investigation had found that the prohibition on [the techniques'] use was still not 'clearly being articulated' to ordinary soldiers... [Phil Shiner said] "There is evidence that British forces in Iraq routinely used coercive interrogation techniques - including sexual humiliation - and that interrogators were made to use them."

In the face of this damning evidence, and very much on the model of the Bush administration, the British Defense Minister Des Browne has the temerity to say:

"Since 2003 we have made considerable improvements to the training and information given to soldiers deploying on operations about the correct and humane treatment of detainees. We have always been clear that we expect our forces to comply fully with international law. We will not tolerate anything less."

Even so, Browne has announced that a judge's inquiry will investigate the "discrepancies" between what military officials told legislators and, presumably, the truth. Such a judicial investigation into official government lies would be welcome in the US as well.

Photo: Autopsy of Baha Musa, Sept. 2003