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Torture enthusiasts are in the line of British fire

Torture, and all that involves - let alone its legality - is very much topical at the moment. If one were to listen to the Bush White House, and its cohorts, its OK to torture. Needless to say there are many others, notably some seemingly misguided lawyers, who take the position that torture can be justified in certain circumstances. That disgraceful professor of law at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz, is one of those who fall into the latter camp.

Richard Ackland, lawyer, commentator and editor of Justinian, in his weekly op-ed piece in the SMH, puts the question of torture out there and reflects on a English case dealing with the subject - and in the process, rightly, takes a stick to those lawyers who would supported torture.

"Remember that clutch of outspoken and confident lawyers who in last year's torture debates bravely came out for the freedom to torture?

They seemed mostly to be from Melbourne. One was a professional loud mouth, whose name I've forgotten, and there was another fellow from one of the Victorian academic centres who also saw the value in an appropriate bit of torture.

Extreme scenarios were posed. What if a detainee knew where the bomb was located that was timed to blow up Parliament House. Well, torture away until you got the answer. Dick Cheney helpfully chimed in, "It's a no brainer".

The only trouble now is that it's unlikely the torturees can even be tried for their alleged crimes. Their confessions are not worth the trouble, or as the judges say, "the evidence is unreliable".

Increasingly this is the truth facing the last spluttering moments of the Bush Administration.

One of the US Federal courts recently reopened a damages claim brought by Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen arrested by the U.S. at JFK airport in 2002 and forcibly extradited to Syria for "interrogation".

He was "interrogated" for a year before being released without charge.

In New York a judge has given the CIA a final deadline before holding the agency in contempt for the "spoliation" of torture videotapes. And then there's Jose Padilla, a US citizen falsely imprisoned in a Navy brig for three-and-a-half years, who is suing John Yoo, the former Justice Department "lawyer" and one of the principal architects of the Bush government's torture policy.

However, the most recent and the biggest blow to torture enthusiasts has come from the Brits. Last week the High Court in London ruled that the UK Government should hand over to lawyers of a Guantanamo detainee, Binyam Mohamed, exculpatory secret documents. Mohamed was a British resident who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002. The United States illegally rendered him to (shudder) Morocco, where he was held for over a year, moved to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, then to the Bagram prison in that country before being shipped off to Guantanamo Bay, which is his current address."

Read the complete piece here.

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