An important revelation today from the Telegraph's chief political correspondent. We now know that Tony Blair knew about and acquiesced in the war crimes of George W. Bush. But it wasn't the first time that a British prime minister was thus tested:
In the autumn of 1990, in the immediate aftermath of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, British intelligence sought a special kind of permission from Downing Street. They wanted the prime minister to make it clear that they could, in defiance of international law, make use of information which they knew to have been acquired as a result of torture.
Margaret Thatcher, then in the last few weeks of her magnificent premiership, carefully considered this request. She consulted her conscience and pondered what was the right thing to do. Within a very short space of time, a clear and magisterial instruction was issued from Downing Street and dispatched around Whitehall: Mrs Thatcher wanted it known that the British state was not, in any circumstances, to make use of intelligence that might have come from victims of torture…
I am told that there were two principal reasons Margaret Thatcher was so strongly opposed to torture. The first was simply pragmatic: she understood that information extracted from terrified victims under duress could never be relied on or trusted.
But more importantly, she instinctively knew that complicity with torture was an affront to everything that Britain stands for – above all, our respect for tolerance, decency and the rule of law.
Pity Cheney and Rumsfeld and Bush didn't have the same core values. There's a chance that Britain may help excavate the recent criminal past of the Bush administration. There's also a chance that incontrovertible evidence could lead to the beginning of a reckoning. If – and only if – Obama wins a second term.
The Dish 