THE MEN WHO SHAMED UK SHOULD BE IN THE DOCK
JACK Straw could not have been clearer or more definitive when he was asked about Britain’s involvement in torture during George W. Bush’s notorious ‘War on Terror’. It was 13 years ago, and the then Foreign Secretary had been called before the foreign affairs select committee.
Given the remarkable events that unfolded yesterday, it is worth repeating the full text of Mr Straw’s denial.
‘Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this there is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States, and also let me say, we believe that [U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice] is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United kingdom has been involved in rendition full stop.’
Today, after a cringing government apology and massive compensation payout to former Libyan dissident Abdul Hakim Belhadj, we know that Britain’s involvement in torture was not a ‘conspiracy theory’, as Jack Straw claimed. It was all too real, and all too horrible.
Indeed, there were a number of other cases in which British officials were shamefully complicit in torture, too.
British agents did not actually carry out torture themselves. However, they aided and abetted it. They provided intelligence, sent questions to the torturers and were heavily involved in the so-called extraordinary rendition programme (that polite euphemism for the kidnap and torture of terror suspects and others) overseen by the CIA in the years after 9/11.
One of the worst of these cases concerned Abdul Hakim Belhadj and his wife Fatima Boudchar.
Belhadj was one of the bitterest enemies of Muammar Gaddafi, the feared dictator of Libya. In 2004 he was abducted with his wife in Thailand and flown to Libya by the CIA, where he was imprisoned for six years and tortured. Belhadj says MI6 provided the CIA with key intelligence which led to his and his wife’s abduction.
This would never have come to light but for the human rights group Human Rights Watch, which discovered correspondence from Sir Mark Allen, head of counter-terrorism at MI6 at the time, to the Libyan intelligence chief, congratulating him on the ‘safe arrival’ of Belhadj in Libya, and noting that the intelligence which allowed the CIA to kidnap Belhadj ‘was British’.
Belhadj was abducted in March 2004, more than a year before Jack Straw gave his evidence to MPs in the House of Commons.
I have looked at Jack Straw’s testimony, and I am afraid he was either incompetent for not knowing what happened on his watch – or he was lying through his teeth.
Yesterday, he said in a statement that he had gaps in his memory, but had given approval in March 2004 for ‘some information to be shared with international partners’. But he said he had no idea that this information might be used to facilitate the abduction of Abdul Hakim Belhadj.
Jack Straw’s claims of innocence are worthless. Those who reach the senior ranks of MI6 were not born yesterday: they do not get involved in illegal actions such as torture without getting explicit authority from their bosses.
Crucially, Jack Straw is not the only member of the Blair government who was involved in covering up torture. So was his successor David Miliband.
In Miliband’s defence, the evidence suggests that the worst of Britain’s involvement may have finished by the time he became Foreign Secretary in 2007. However, Miliband – who now earns a staggering £400,000 as head of an international charity – was intimately involved in the cover-ups of this appalling wrongdoing.
He, too, repeatedly lied about his knowledge of extraordinary rendition in an attempt to keep the government off the hook.
The third member of this morally squalid troika was Tony Blair himself, who allowed himself – and by extension Britain – to become George W. Bush’s principal lieutenant in his so-called War on Terror.
Since then, successive governments have failed to lay bare the extent of this appalling crime. In 2010, David Cameron set in motion an inquiry into torture after the Belhadj documents came to light, but it did little to shine a light on what really went on.
What a contrast to the very powerful investigation into torture that was conducted by Senator Dianne Feinstein in Washington from 20092015, and which revealed the brutal reality of what went on far from the public gaze. While the CIA involvement in torture was far more systematic and terrible than that of MI6, the United States has shown a real commitment to bringing its own wrongdoing to light.
The same cannot be said of Brit- ain. Crucially, yesterday’s apology was only extracted after a legal claim by Belhadj and his lawyers.
Throughout all of this, Abdul Hakim Belhadj has behaved with extraordinary honour and decency. He has insisted that he does not want money for himself, and has merely been asking for an apology.
I interviewed him in Libya in 2011, shortly after he had been released from jail, where he had been tortured for years by Gaddafi’s goons. When we met, Gaddafi had only been dead a few weeks, but already Belhadj was a powerful political figure in post-Gaddafi Tripoli.
Even so, I could see the pain of the torture on his face. There was no question that he and his wife had been through a great deal, and they fully deserve the apology they received yesterday.
But this should not be the end of the matter. Jack Straw and the MI6 official responsible for the abduction of Belhadj, Sir Mark Allen, should also apologise. It is disgraceful they did not do so long ago.
I also believe we should seriously consider whether they should face criminal prosecution. Both of them have done terrible damage to Britain’s international reputation.
ONLY through prosecution can we demonstrate as a nation our moral abhorrence at the crime of torture. There was a four-year Scotland Yard investigation into whether Sir Mark Allen or indeed anyone else in the British intelligence community should be prosecuted. The file was handed to the director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders.
I’m told that the police officers involved in investigating the Belhadj case felt they had assembled very strong evidence. Yet Alison Saunders decided not to proceed with a case.
In his statement yesterday, Jack Straw said that he would be happy to give evidence to the toothless intelligence and security committee in the House of Commons. That isn’t good enough either. I believe that whoever replaces the departing Alison Saunders as director of public prosecutions in October should reopen the file.
If he or she decides not to do so, they will be sending a message across the world that Britain tolerates torture. nothing less than prosecution will express the moral disgust of the British people at the treatment of Abdul Hakim Belhadj.