Can I have my government back, please? Because someone seems to have swapped them for the cast of Fawlty Towers.

Binyam Mohamed gave an interview to today’s Mail on Sunday in which he describes in greater detail what he’s been through over the past seven years. Among other things, he talks about a message he saw from the British counter-intelligence agency, MI5, to the CIA, giving a list of questions to be asked of him during interrogation while he was in Morocco.

In case you’ve been living in a cave for a few months, Morocco is where they apparently cut him with razorblades – in the places you would least wish to find a razorblade.

In response to which revelation, the authorities here are saying “oooh, no, we had no idea this was happening.”

Okay, so here’s what we absolutely know that they knew:

that this guy was in U.S. custody;

that he was not being held in Bagram, in Guantánamo, or on the U.S. mainland;

that the U.S. refused to divulge where he was;

that he was being interrogated;

that he was suddenly confessing to a lot of things, many of which were actually impossible;

that he had been transported across jurisdictions without his consent and was being denied access to, er, any kind of outside contact at all, in violation of, er, lots of laws. (more)

Not to put too fine a point on it, if our government and our intelligence services did not know what was happening to this guy, it is because they chose, actively and with an eye to this moment, not to know. And that is not better.

When a government – my government – is accused of collusion in torture, I want a better answer than an Andrew Sachs impression.

Also, it’s pretty clear that they did know.

Mohamed’s allegations that MI5 colluded in his torture have been upheld in the High Court where judges said the role of the Security Service went “far beyond that of a bystander” but documents detailing his treatment have been withheld by the Government at the request of the US. (link)

I’ll take my independent inquiry right now, please.