Suppressio veri

The thing to do, apparently, is to deny with indignation what hadn't been asserted. I have always been naive about these things and my thought that I am being cynical about all this is probably a further expression of naivety ...

It is put to Jack Straw that he 'ignored the advice' of his FCO legal adviser, Sir Michael Woods: and he replies that he certainly didn't ignore it but read it very carefully, thus we are diverted from the issue of his reasons for rejecting the advice.

Now let us suppose, against all the indignant protestations, that MI5 officers had been 'complicit' in the torture of Binyam Mohamed ... and then ask ourselves whether this is denied by Jonathan Evans: "We did not practice mistreatment or torture and do not do so now, nor do we collude in torture or encourage others to torture on our behalf".

Well, the truth is that it is not denied. The past tense reference denies that we practised torture then but is silent about whether we colluded then. There is then a jump to the present tense in which it is denied that we now collude in torture, using the ambiguity of the continuous present which affirms that we don't torture people to suggest that haven't colluded in torture in the past.

Now we come to Alan Johnson: "The Security Services in our country do not practice torture, they do not endorse torture, they don't encourage others to torture on our behalf, they don't collude in torture". Leaving aside the 'in our country' (which leaves open what they do abroad) Johnson's remarks say nothing about what we might have done at Bagram or Guantanamo in the past. You don't need to encourage others to torture to take advantage of it, nor do you need to have colluded in it in order to be complicit.

Now we come to the Foreign Secretary in conjunction with the Home Secretary: "the allegation that our security and intelligence agencies have license to collude in torture is disgraceful ... the government's clear policy is not to participate in, solicit, encourage or condone the use of torture". Again the present tense diverts us from what actually happened in the past. 'Have license to' is significant. I take it to imply that it would be illegal and that therefore we could never admit it. The reference to our clear policy asserts something about our policy and says nothing about what might have happened except to iply that if it did happen we should have to deny it.