As ballot papers for Labour’s leadership land on doorsteps this week, those charged with electing the next Leader of the Opposition, namely party members, MPs and affiliated trades unionists have a duty not only to consider their party’s best interests, but the country’s best interests too.

They should at least pause to consider, amongst the myriad of issues and concerns closest to them, one of the darkest episodes of New Labour’s decade in power, namely the role allegedly played by a number of Ministers in what has come to be known as ‘Extraordinary Rendition’.  Knowingly allowing terror suspects to be transferred through British airspace, in order for them to be tortured in third countries and to allow British Agents to gather information from suspects treated in this way, is a deadly serious issue.  It goes to the heart of what is morally defensible and what is legal in an advanced liberal democracy.

The Guardian reported in 2005 on rendition flights dating back from 2001, over 240 of them to be precise, that flew in and out of British airspace and airports. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_United_States

 In December 2003, I raised the possibility that prisoners were being held illegally on Diego Garcia, British Indian Ocean Territory in The Independent. http://www.globalsecurity.org/org/news/2003/031213-british-gtmo.htm

These claims were denied by another former Minister, Baroness Amos, who is shortly to take over as Under Secretary General of Humanitarian Affairs at the United Nations, but were finally admitted to be true by Miliband to Parliament in 2008. Clive Stafford Smith and his team at Reprieve have relentlessly sought to expose Britain’s involvement – so strenuously denied – in what have been quite despicable acts that are not only illegal but morally indefensible.

When the new Coalition Government overruled the objections from Tony Blair and other members of the previous Government and announced an independent Judicial Investigation under the chairmanship of Appeal Court Judge, Sir Peter Gibson, one MP recalls that at least two faces on the Opposition front bench turned ashen. They were those of a previous Foreign and Home Secretary, Jack Straw and former Foreign Secretary, David Miliband. The Judicial Inquiry will amongst other lines of inquiry seek to discover exactly what Miliband and others knew about a secret interrogation policy that allowed agents in places such as Afghanistan to interrogate people who had been tortured, as long as they did not participate in actual torture or seek to condone it. The Inquiry will want to know what Miliband knew of how this policy was developed or not from 2004 onwards.

For how could Ministers sleep at night if they knew that their weasel words about “not condoning torture”, still allowed intelligence to be gathered from people who had been tortured?