There isn’t one. That was a trick headline.
The line between a state that tortures and the state that does everything in its power to avoid the physical abuse of individuals in its name is what defined the late twentieth century drive against barbarism. When the French were exposed using specially adapted field radios to pass electric shocks through suspected rebels in Algeria it rightly caused outrage in a world still recovering from the reality of the Holocaust.
We are a little less easy to horrify now. But the revelation that our own intelligence services have been prepared to use the fruits of torture, however unwittingly, still has the ability to digust.
The response this story fascinates me, though, because we are still thinking about the way this intelligence has been used in a very limited way. Alan Johnson and David Miliband were able to write with some confidence for the Sunday Telegraph this weekend that:
“There is no truth in suggestions that the security and intelligence services operate without control or oversight.
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