People who wish to ignore David Miliband’s lack of moral courage or principle and want him to be Labour leader should explain just what would put him beyond being considered for the job. Although given many also supported Tony Blair one must conclude that blind tribalism and a hatred of Tories reduced to a team sports level goes a long way. I guess Stalin was ok, ’til he had you removed from photos? Would Dave supporters proclaim, ‘say what you like about Peter Sutcliffe, but he was a hell of a good lorry driver.’ He can beat the Tories, Washington loves him, his dad was a proper lefty…erm and some other bollocks.

Torture, look it up. If you need a clue whether it is wrong or not have a look down at your genitals, put your hand on them and ponder if you would like them slashed with a razor blade on a daily basis while the British secret service wait outside with a list of questions. You may just begin to divine an answer from that, just a tad, a wee inkling. I know it’s not easy, you’re not very bright, you think a dead Iraqi is busy welcoming us with hearts and flowers in the afterlife as freedom spreads through their body along with rigor mortis and democracy, ditto Afghans. Your burning tribalism sees beating Tories as more important than basic human rights and you have been convinced the way to do that is to have largely the same agenda while the luxury of opposition allows an adversarial fantasy of- hey, we just might not of implemented this shock doctrine ourselves, Dave’s da Man! I mean if your idea of democracy is an opposition that would -slightly less speedily- enact neoliberal social war on behalf of its corporate chums versus a coalition that would do it a bit faster, then yes, Dave is da man and all hail Next Labour.

Not that the others are dreamboats, but it really would be nice to have an opposition you could support to one degree or another without handing the Condems a 100% slam dunk total victory over dear leader as they hold the inquiry into torture. And really, I ask again, are you ready to be the leftwing person arguing in support of torture and its covering up just so your leader is not comprehensively destroyed by oppurtunistic Condem spin? (You and Dick Cheney’s apologists, you should contact them now to swap strategy just in case, won’t be too hard, Blair pioneered Labourites allying with demented tyrants.) That’s the pragmatic argument if the basic- torture is wrong stuff eludes your witless brains. The end never justifies the means, if you think DM is the only guy to beat the Condems and you can live with his shortcomings because of that…

1. You are wrong, he is not the messiah etc. get some self respect.
2. What do you draw the line at?

When you are in a pitch black room under the earth and the guards come and drag you, naked, mutilated to another session, who do you hope is sat in Downing Street with the power to stop it? Someone who has previously shown they won’t?

The Left must surely comprise of a basic idea that humans are equal, that systems that negate this and impose inequality, alienation and injustice must be changed, that there is a kinship with others and our environment, not a cut throat competition to win at all costs. Torture is that win at all costs extreme (and of course fatally flawed unless we accept the purpose we engage in it is to create further enemies to rationalise further warmongering), it is a total rejection of a shared humanity, it is the adoption of an absolute separation from a person who is being profoundly abused under your power. It is a tactic where there is no society, only individuals judging outcomes, of enlighten(ment?)ed self interest, it is an extreme of selfishness.

David Miliband has repeatedly acted to cover up and protect perpetrators, every time he instructed government solicitors and barristers to fight in court he took a side, every time he let a captive be ‘interrogated‘ abroad he was turning a blind eye. Which shows not a momentary lapse of judgement but repeated reasoned decisions to allow torture and to protect perpetrators. The Pope must be wondering why he gets all the protests.

There are lines you don’t cross and expect to lead a party of the left that has to be fighting for an equal and just Britain in the face of the most vicious onslaught of class war since before WW2 (I mean, the IFS, hardly a fucking hard left think tank, will Clegg call them Marxists next, get some Teabagger/TPA juice going?). David Miliband crossed that line, he showed when push comes to shove he is of the right, he is of the establishment that crushes its target du jour without mercy. And no, that does not make him an ideal leader and Tory basher, it makes him another Blairite betrayal in waiting. The means are the ends, time we learned that.

Labour needs a new leader not another fucking war criminal.

David Miliband gave MI6 the green light to proceed with intelligence-gathering operations in countries where there was a possible risk of terrorism suspects being tortured, the Guardian has learned.

During the three years Miliband served as foreign secretary, MI6 always consulted him personally before embarking on what a source described as “any particularly difficult” attempts to gain information from a detainee held by a country with a poor human rights record.

While Miliband blocked some operations, he is known to have given permission for others to proceed. Officers from MI5 are understood to have sought similar permission from a series of home secretaries in recent years.

Today, 24 hours before the Labour leadership election closed, Miliband took the unprecedented step of returning to the Foreign Office to study files relating to three British citizens who were tortured in Bangladesh and Egypt while he was foreign secretary. After spending almost two hours examining the papers, he issued a statement in which he said the documents contained no evidence that UK ministers were asked to grant permission for any of the men to be detained, and said that it would be wrong to suggest that he had ever sanctioned torture. The statement does not address the possibility that intelligence extracted under torture was later received by the UK authorities.

…

As foreign secretary, Miliband fought an unsuccessful legal battle to prevent the public seeing part of a court judgment that showed MI5 was aware Binyam Mohamed was being tortured in Pakistan before one of its officers was sent to interrogate him. He also resisted calls for the publication of the secret interrogation policy governing MI5 and MI6 officers, on the grounds that to do so would “give succour to our enemies”. Since then he has been sensitive to questions about the role he played in authorising counter-terrorism operations.

Miliband declined to answer a number of questions put by the Guardian 12 days ago about his role in granting MI6 permission to proceed with such operations, and his assertion that he always struck the correct balance. As a consequence it was unclear whether he knew that people were being tortured. He also said he was unable to say how often MI6 asked for permission to proceed with such operations, and how often he refused. Earlier this year, Bangladeshi authorities told the Guardian that during 2007-08 they investigated around 12 British nationals resident in Bangladesh at the request of British intelligence officers. One senior counter-terrorism official in Dhaka said that the question of whether any of these individuals posed any risk to the UK “could not have been dealt with by British law – because of the question of human rights”. The official declined to elaborate. There is evidence that at least two British citizens have been tortured in Bangladesh during the last 18 months. Miliband said today that the files he scrutinised contained no evidence of ministers being asked for permission to detain those two men, nor a third Briton detained and tortured in Cairo in July 2008.