Dispatches: Kidnap and Torture American Style - New UK documentary

Dispatches: Kidnap and Torture American Style

As Tony Blair unveils his tough new line on deporting foreign terror subjects following the July bombings, journalist Andrew Gilligan investigates whether these new rules will mean suspects, who have never been found guilty by a jury, will be delivered into the hands of torturers.

Gilligan examines the evidence that Britain's support for America's War on Terror has extended to alleged complicity in the practice of 'extraordinary rendition' - the abduction of terror suspects and their removal to regimes with poor human rights records.

Dispatches: Kidnap and Torture American Style follows the stories of terror suspects. Some of them are British residents, who have been snatched from streets and airports throughout the world before being flown to the Middle-East and Africa. In countries such as Syria and Egypt, they undergo agonising ordeals before being incarcerated, without ever facing an open trial.

Testimonies from those suspects allege that Britain has a key role in these shady operations from supplying intelligence information on which interrogations are based, to ordering their arrest and detention.

With the legality of extraordinary rendition being questionable at best, Gilligan speaks to Elizabeth Wilmshurst, the former Deputy Director of Legal Affairs at the British Foreign Office. She resigned in protest over Britain's decision to join the invasion of Iraq. In her first interview since her resignation, she voices her concern about reports of Britain's involvement in the CIA's torture by proxy.

Twenty-two people in Britain are now awaiting deportation to countries which are known to carry out torture. Gilligan asks if the policy of deportation to countries where diplomatic assurances against torture are likely to be broken is any different to extraordinary rendition when the end result is the same – the torture chamber.