AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Torture and Secrecy Scandal Intensifies

A British Tory seems to be leading the way here in opposing the barbarian body snatchers. Good for Andrew Tyrie.
But does David Cameron support him, or is he happy with Bellus Americana, as I call the CIA invasion of Europe.

AlterNet: Rights and Liberties: Torture and Secrecy Scandal Intensifies: "ANDREW TYRIE: Well, let's deal with each of those points in turn. First of all, I'm not a lawyer, but it seems to me fairly clear that since Britain, for example, has incorporated the U.N. Convention Against Torture directly into its domestic law, if we are knowingly allowing flights to pass through the U.K., land there, have refueling, and then go on, knowing that it's likely that people are going to be tortured, it strikes me that those actions must make us complicit in the torture and that, therefore, we have broken the Convention.

Likewise, I suspect that we may have broken the Human Rights Act if we have done this. There would also be, possibly, breaches to the criminal law, the ordinary criminal law, which, of course, prohibits torture; and that's a question which another pressure group in Britain called Liberty is actually pursuing with the police authorities at the moment.

As far as your second question is concerned, the problem is none of us know the facts. None of us know whether there is any holding center in the U.K. I think that's unlikely, because I think we would have got to hear about it. I suspect that's perhaps why the American…administration has been setting up these in countries in Eastern Europe….

What I do know -- I hope I have not gone on too long -- is that we need a healthy debate about this in a democracy, and we need to make up our minds whether this is the right way to go. I think torturing people is likely to make the war against terrorism more difficult, not less difficult.

Of course, Condoleezza Rice has now said we must have this healthy debate, but only [on Sunday] her spokesman, Mr. Hanley, was saying these are things that shouldn't be talked about in public. And there does seem to be a pretty flat contradiction between those two points."