Remember, remember...

When I was a kid the Fifth of November was always called Guy Fawkes’ Night. It was named after one of the conspirators who stockpiled gunpowder in the crypt of the Houses of Parliament in November 399 years ago, in the hope that the explosion would kill the protestant King James, so creating a crisis that would usher in a new Roman Catholic king.

Guy (or Guido) Fawkes was a soldier left to watch secretly over the kegs of gunpowder.  However, someone disclosed the plot to the authorities and Fawkes and his friends were arrested, tortured and executed in a way designed to deter others from trying to overthrow the king.  For that reason, it was common to make a Guy each year and push ‘him’ around the streets seeking “Penny for the Guy.” The various pennies would be spent on fireworks and R. Whites’ pop and the Guy would be thrown onto the bonfire. Happy days.

Let’s be clear that King James was no saint (despite burdening the church with the Bible named after him, with its idolatrous and sycophantic preface) but he didn’t deserve to be blown to bits. By the same token, the Gunpowder Plot conspirators – acting as they did out of misguided conscience – did not deserve to be tortured, mutilated and then subjected to a prolonged death.  A comparison of Fawke’s two signatures above, after and before 9 days’ torture in the Tower of London, hints at what such torture can do.

Well ‘autre temps, autre moeurs’, as we so often say in Essex. We must not judge the actions of people 4 centuries ago by modern moral standards.  Yet, in spite of all the advances we have made as a human race, such barbarity continues.  Just yesterday, an enraged mob tortured a young Pakistani Christian couple and incinerated their bodies in a brick kiln in eastern Pakistan. The young wife was pregnant.

And the suspicion continues to prevail that our government (yes, the government of the United Kingdom in the 21st century) has colluded in the illegal kidnapping, transportation and torture of people within the past 10 years.  Human rights law bans the use of torture or inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. This requires not only that countries do not engage in torture or subject people to ill-treatment, but that they don’t become complicit in torture or ill-treatment. Yet, over the past few years, increasing evidence has come to light of UK knowledge of, and involvement in, the CIA’s post 9/11 programme of ‘extraordinary rendition’ (that is, kidnapping people and secretly transporting them to places where they can be ‘questioned’ out of the public gaze) and in attempts to use information obtained through the use of torture as evidence in UK courts.

The UK High Court has found in relation to Mr Binyam Mohamed, a former Guantanamo Bay detainee, that UK security services helped US authorities interrogate Mr Mohamed although they knew that he was being detained unlawfully and in cruel, inhuman and degrading conditions. As recently as last month, the Court of Appeal ruled that a husband and wife who were ‘rendered’ to then President Gaddafi’s prisons, allegedly in a secret deal by Tony Blair, are to be allowed their day in court.

The trouble is that most of any documentary proof rests in the hands of people who, if they are guilty, will not disclose it. So both the Americans and the UK government are refusing to disclose the facts, citing ‘national security reasons’, though political embarrassment and fear of prosecution may be equally powerful motives.

399 years after the Gunpowder Plot, we no longer believe, whatever our consciences tell us, that it’s OK to blow up the sovereign or parliament. We no longer castrate, mutilate, torture, disembowel, partially hang then slice ‘baddies’ into four parts, even for the crime of treason. In fact we don’t even go collecting Penny for the Guy anymore.

And no country that wants to look any other in the eye should just choose to look the other way when it knows that people are being kidnapped and tortured by a superpower. We should prosecute those we suspect, whoever they are. It is time the torturers - and their political masters - start to feel afraid.