Memory is rather unfashionable these days. Nobody seems able to remember a simple fact anymore, unless prompted by the phone in their pocket.

We’ve forgotten the most basic skills, like map-reading. Indeed, some appear to have forgotten how to read anything more than a few hundred characters of text before slipping into an attention-collapse.

However, you’d think that we’d manage to remember that our government engaged in torture. It seems quite important.

Even if torture somehow slips the mind of the public, surely the government would remember? If you were involved in torture, wouldn’t it perhaps stay somewhere in your memory banks?

Pity our poor government, then. It’s a sure sign of dotage when you can’t recall the crimes you’ve committed.

Read more by Neil Mackay

I know the Government is busy, but I’m pretty confident that no matter how run off our feet you or I may be we’d remember screams from a torture chamber.

This failure of memory struck me as I read accounts of an ongoing tribunal hearing centred on whether British intelligence was complicit in the mistreatment of two men tortured by America’s CIA in the early 2000s.

The case is continuing behind closed doors, where the findings will be considered in secret.

It centres on two alleged al-Qaeda terrorists. Both have been in Guantanamo Bay since 2006, and were held incommunicado at secret "black site" prisons where they were “systematically” tortured.

Lawyers for the two – Mustafa al-Hawsawi, accused of aiding the 9/11 hijackers, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, alleged to have plotted al-Qaeda’s bombing of a US naval ship – claim there’s credible evidence British intelligence unlawfully aided, abetted, conspired or “were........

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