Mary Riddell comments in the Telegraph :
As the former Whitehall security chief, Sir David Omand, implies, the security services will soon be privy to our every detail, from our dwindling savings to our taste in shower gel. Most galling is the imbalance of data-sharing, under which ministers know everything about us while we know little about them. True, we may discover an MP's outlay on Philippe Starck lemon-squeezers, or whether he or she (legitimately, of course) declares a top bunk in a youth hostel as a primary residence.
On the other hand, we can't know what was in the Iraq war Cabinet minutes, because Jack Straw has defied two rulings that they should be released. That veto is as rash as it is disgraceful. Not only does it suggest an illiberal government - an impression borne out by the Justice Secretary's Coroners and Justice Bill, which promotes secret military inquests and, in Clause 152, a sweeping sanction for data swapping – it also gives the appearance of a government with shameful secrets to hide. A similar impression was created in the case of the Guantánamo returnee. To the dismay of two judges, the Foreign Secretary declined to publish the intelligence dossier that secured the release of Mr Mohamed, who claims he was tortured with the complicity of M15 officers.
David Miliband is privately appalled at being branded by the media as the Minister for Torture. He has a fair point, since he pressed for Mr Mohamed's return and urged that his defence counsel have access to the disputed dossier. It is possible, or even likely, that Mr Miliband would like the material disclosed, but he has stuck to the line that the Americans must decide. Downing Street and the Foreign Office cannot yet decipher just how open Barack Obama is prepared to be, and neither wants to be wrong-footed.
Baroness Scotland, the Attorney General, has a more clear-cut decision to make: whether there should be a criminal investigation into Mr Mohamed's alleged torture. Despite mulling this over since October, she has so far failed to say whether or not MI5 officers have a possible case to answer. Any further foot-dragging would fuel furious suspicions of a cover-up, but for the ambivalence inspired by Mr Mohamed. To some he is a maligned hero who survived adversity with courage; others see him as a dubious potential sponger on a state of which he is not a citizen. Neither caricature is relevant. Whether he was tortured with razor blades (as he says), or less savagely (as some close to the Foreign Office believe), human rights are universal and – in the case of torture – absolute. Any state that fails to excavate the whole truth is also more likely to strip citizens of their privacy and basic freedoms.
Britain is in an invidious place. The war on terror may be over, in name at least, but its apparatus of draconian laws bears down on everyone from the terror suspect placed, with no explanation, under a control order to the pensioner putting a wheelie bin out on the wrong day.
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