Soooo… I had a lovely birthday, and thank you all for your greetings :)

And then I came back and tripped over this.

And I thought: okay, I do not get into US politics more than I have to, because it is, y’know, US politics and I’m a Brit.

And then I thought: are you kidding me? I have family over there. And it’s the US. I love the US.

And then I thought: Plus, you know, world’s only superpower. I do have an interest.

So here – this is for all those reasons.

Basically: this is one of the scariest things I have ever seen in my entire life. It is scary not only because of what it means today but because of what it might mean tomorrow, and it is scary because the idea that anyone could consider it appropriate to bring a provision like this to the floor of the US Senate should utterly appall pretty much the entire US and it seemingly hasn’t. It should actually be unthinkable for anyone to do this.

Look: it doesn’t matter whether you are a dandy New York elitist pinko metrosexual or a red-eyed gator-wrestling Lone Star gun nut. This is the most wrong-headed bit of regressive, oppressive crazy since King George. It messes with some of the most fundamental rights you have – rights so old that you had them before you were even an independent nation. The framers of the US Constitution? They knew Magna Carta was important. John Locke? Drew on Magna Carta. The rights this bit of drivel casually does away with are one chamber of the beating heart of US democracy. And here your Senators are either actively trying to take them away from you or messing with them for political gain during an election. If the former, they are merely horribly wrong. If the latter, they’re like kids playing with a live high voltage cable to scare mom. I leave you to decide which of those is more wretched.

So here’s a recommendation from someone who lives in a country with a long and inglorious history of Empire and bad behaviour, a country which still has a monarch, and which – if this goes through – will be more free than the US by a mile: you should not only write to your Senators to tell them to vote against this bill; if they fail to do so, you should elect someone who cares about the freedoms which define the US. And the muffinheads who wasted your government’s time with this during a financial crisis? Show ‘em the door.

This has been a rant by an irritated fabulist. Thank you for reading.

Rendition to torture is not less vile than torture itself, and it is moral cowardice into the bargain.

Either torture someone yourself and acknowledge that that’s who you are – and therefore you’re no longer the good guys, you’re just another bunch of murderous thugs in a world which already has a superfluity – or put your hand up against torture in any form. Sending people away to another country so that they can be cut with razorblades while you slip notes under the door and salve your conscience with assurances of good conduct from regimes noted for bad conduct is not clean, it’s just pathetically craven.

That said, I can see how you could convince yourself it was necessary, if the environment around you was conducive – and it sure as hell has been in the UK over the last decade and more. I know about the Lucifer Effect. I’ve seen the Milgram tapes. I get it. And I have heard – though I do not agree with – the political arguments about the necessity of torture in combating terrorism. Never mind that the former head of MI5 does not agree. Never mind that the senior figures I’ve spoken to in this arena have no faith in information gained through torture and would rather mount an operation based on a soft interrogation. Never mind that the information we got from torture between 2001 and 2003 ‘confirmed’ any number of things which weren’t true.

Never mind any of that. Let’s accept, for a second, that there might be a rationale for sending someone away to be tortured.

Can somebody please tell me how anyone could imagine that sending their kids along with them was in any way at all the act of a government or a nation which deserves respect? Because it has to be acknowledged that kids do get tortured. They are not immune. Wives get tortured, too. It’s a great way to cause pain which never goes away. Grade A torture skillz.

But if there’s a way in which it’s not just frankly evil and criminal, I’m not seeing it.

Iraq was not a threat, and the invasion in 2003 was a distraction from the pursuit of Al Qaeda.

That’s the verdict of Baroness Manningham-Buller, who was head of MI5 from 2002-2007. It’s old news now that Tony Blair took us into war on a second front on grounds which were shaky at best. All the same, this bald statement from the former Director General of MI5 should be headline news, not for what it tells us about Tony Blair’s government or the ridiculous contortions of law and intelligence required to get us to war, but for the rugs it pulls from beneath some very large feet.

Back in pre-history, a journalist named Andrew Gilligan asserted that the government had ‘sexed up’ the dossier of published intelligence about Iraq. The government expressed its horror at the very notion, and Gilligan and the BBC were hauled across hot coals. The Hutton Inquiry found that the dossier had not been ‘sexed up’. Gilligan, the chairman, and the director general of the BBC all lost their jobs. The government used the incident as a stick with which to beat the corporation for years. The attempt to cut the BBC’s disobedient news arm down to a more manageable and biddable form continues to this day. (In the past, one prime minister was able to require that the BBC reorder the sequence of footage in the reporting of a riot to make it seem that rioters attacked police, rather than the other way around. Downing Street must long for the good old days.)

But the point isn’t the endless, tedious whinging of affronted politicians at a news organisation which is, in general, pretty solid.

The point is how we conduct inquiries.

Hutton found that the dossier had not been politically influenced. Butler found, in contrast, that more weight had been placed on the intelligence than it could bear. And here is Eliza Manningham-Buller saying:

“Iraq did not present a threat to the UK.

The service advised that [an invasion] was likely to increase the domestic threat and that it was a distraction from the pursuit of al-Qaeda. I understood the need to focus on Afghanistan. Iraq was a distraction.”

And you have Major General Michael Laurie, who was instrumental in drawing up the September dossier, who wrote to the Chilcot inquiry to say that the dossier had been compiled to make the case for war. Sir John Scarlett, in charge of the September dossier, wrote to Downing Street that there was an advantage in “obscuring the fact that in terms of WMD Iraq is not that exceptional.”

If you accept these statements, the question is not whether the intelligence was manipulated for political ends, but how this manipulation was done and at what point. What Eliza Manningham-Buller says appears sets the whole issue on its head: the dossier was not ‘sexed up’; if I understand correctly, it must have been edited or drafted so that what the intelligence services actually believed – that Iraq was not a threat – was hard to find in its pages, leaving only alarming discussions of Iraq’s supposed (and as it turned out non-existent) WMD capacity.

And yet we’re left to piece all this together from scraps. Despite Hutton, Butler, and Chilcot, and a smattering of other reviews, the mechanism of deception has not been exposed. The persons involved in turning black into white – terrifying the British public and parliament into a war which was (whatever you think about the pros and cons of humanitarian military intervention) unnecessary in terms of immediate self-protection and which may have made our security situation worse, and which has proved a massively costly adventure in terms of human life and hard cash – have not been called to account. Ministers and officials have been politely quizzed, and their good faith has been assumed. They have been invited to appear before kindly panels, not subjected to serious questioning on what is arguably the most serious question of our political era.

Our inquiries are toothless and ineffectual, and for as long as that remains the case our democracy is significantly weakened.