Tag Archives: peter gibson

| Proof of Rendition: A Very British Cover-Up!

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A Very British Cover-Up ~ Matt Carr’s Infernal Machine.

It’s the festive season and folks probably don’t want to hear about the complicity of the British government’s involvement in illegally kidnapping terrorist suspects and flying them around the world to be tortured by dictators.

Such things leave a bad taste in the mouth, and make the moral high ground suddenly slippery and precarious, especially for those who continue to believe that our government has been engaged in an elevated moral struggle on behalf of our democratic values and ‘way of life’ against the enemies of freedom.

Nevertheless, bad news doesn’t always come when we want to hear it, but it sometimes comes when the government doesn’t want us to pay any attention to it.

On Thursday, with the nation winding down and xmas shopping, retired judge Sir Peter Gibson completed a review of 20,000 top secret documents pertaining to allegations of involvement by MI5 and MI6 officers in the American ‘extraordinary rendition’ program introduced in the aftermath of 9/11.

Sir Peter concluded from his study of these documents that:

‘It does appear…that the United Kingdom may have been inappropriately involved in some renditions. That is a very serious matter. And no doubt any future inquiry would want to look at that.’

Maybe, but that doesn’t mean that the British establishment wants to. The government has announced that the ’27 issues’ identified by Sir Peter as worthy of concern will be investigated by the Parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), a body which the intrepid investigator Chris Ames has called ‘ toothless, clawless, and clueless.’

One of the suspects rendered was the Islamist Libyan fighter Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, who alleges that he was ‘rendered’ by the CIA in Kuala Lumpur, then to Bangkok while flying from China to the UK with his pregnant wife to claim asylum, and flown to back to Libya, where he was tortured.

Belhaj was a member of the Libyan Islamic Fighter Group (LIFG), consisting mostly of veterans of the Afghan mujahideen who were looking to overthrow Gaddafi. But this was before the world decided that Gaddafi’s regime was an oppressive dictatorship and helped overthrow it.

In those days Libya was just one of various countries, such as Syria and Egypt, to which prisoners in the ‘war on terror’ could be flown precisely because those countries were oppressive dictatorships that were able to do things to their prisoners that our chaps generally preferred not to do in their own countries.

Golden days, and Belhaj got the full treatment. He was imprisoned for seven years in the notorious Abu Salim prison, during which time he was repeatedly beaten and kept in solitary in a dark room.

Since then documents found in Libya suggest that the head of M16 Sir Mark Allen provided the CIA with the intelligence that led to his abduction, and that British intelligence agents may have provided his Libyan interrogators with questions they wanted to ask him.

Belhaj was released in 2010 under a ‘de-radicalization’ amnesty presided over by Saif Gadaffi. In 2011 he became a de facto ally of the UK during the overthrow of Gaddafi he has since been trying to sue Jack Straw, Allen, and the British Foreign Office. The lawsuit involved £3 million in damages, but Belhaj has since declared that he will only ask for £1 pound, and that what he wants is for British complicity to be revealed.

Yesterday however, Mr Justice Simon announced that this is not going to happen, and that Belhaj’s case cannot go forward.

The judge conceded that Belhaj had a ‘potentially well-founded claim that the UK authorities were directly implicated in the extra-ordinary rendition of the claimants’. He also noted that a court of law rather than the ISC was the proper forum to pursue his allegations. Nevertheless, he rejected this possibility because – you guessed it – it would ‘jeopardize national security.’

More specifically, Judge Simon has pointed out the fact that American officials were also involved would damage the ‘national interest’ insofar as British relations with the United States are concerned.

And anyway, he says, the case is ‘non-justiciable’ in the UK because it involved officials in China, Malaysia, Thailand and Libya.

In other words, it’s ok for UK intelligence officers to kidnap or torture someone, and even for the government to sanction actions abroad that it knows to be illegal, as long there is an American involved, or these actions take place abroad and therefore become ‘non-justiciable’ in the country that colluded with them.

It is rather neat, when you think about it. But something tells me that our crusty and unaccountable establishment doesn’t want anyone to think about it too much.

Something tells me that it would like the public to put its feet up and take comfort in the thought that the security agents who are working night and day to ‘keep us safe’ from the terrorists who hate our values can do whatever they want, whenever they want, in accordance with the highest principles of an advanced democracy.

And if the government deems it necessary from time to time to depart from these practices, and send someone off to have their feet or testicles beaten, that is not something that concerns us.

Because reasons of state are not for public consumption. Is that clear? Good. Now off you go and enjoy your Christmas.

And remember, that we really are the good guys in this.

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| UK ‘was inappropriately involved in rendition!’

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UK ‘was inappropriately involved in rendition’ ~ BBC.

There is evidence Britain was inappropriately involved in the rendition and ill-treatment of terror suspects, an inquiry has revealed.

Retired judge Sir Peter Gibson reviewed 20,000 top secret documents after allegations of wrongdoing by MI5 and MI6 officers in the wake of 9/11.

He found no evidence officers were directly involved in the torture or rendition of suspects.

But he said further investigation was needed into evidence of complicity.

Minister without portfolio Ken Clarke announced that a further investigation by a committee of MPs and peers will now be held into areas of concern highlighted by Sir Peter.

Sir Peter told reporters: “It does appear from the documents that the United Kingdom may have been inappropriately involved in some renditions. That is a very serious matter. And no doubt any future inquiry would want to look at that.”

‘Not robust enough’

In a statement to MPs, Mr Clarke said the guidance for intelligence agencies on detention and torture was “inadequate” in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 and “it is now clear that we were in some respects not prepared for the extreme demands suddenly placed on them”.

“The period of time was one in which we and our international partners were suddenly adapting to a completely new scale and type of threat from fundamentalist, religious extremists” – Ken Clarke, Minister without portfolio

The “oversight” of intelligence activities with detainees was “not robust enough,” the former justice secretary added.

Mr Clarke did not rule out the possibility of a judicial inquiry into rendition claims after the Intelligence and Security Committee has completed its report.

Jack Straw, who was foreign secretary during the period covered by Sir Peter’s report, welcomed the Parliamentary committee’s investigation, at which he and other witnesses will be able to give evidence.

But he stressed that he never condoned the ill-treatment of terror suspects during his time in office.

“I was never in any way complicit in the unlawful rendition or detention of individuals by the United States or any other states,” he told MPs.

‘Repeated objections’

He said he had agreed to the transfer of British nationals being held in the US to Guantanamo Bay but added: “We never agreed in any way to the mistreatment of those detainees or to the denial of their rights.”

He urged MPs to accept “that we made repeated objections to the United States government about these matters and that I was able to secure the release of all British detainees from Guantanamo Bay by January 2005”.

Sir Peter’s report does not offer final conclusions because it did not have the chance to interview witnesses because of ongoing police investigations. Instead it sets out 27 issues he feels need to be examined further.

“It would be wrong to leave these issues, many of which relate to matters of policy, unexamined for the unknown amount of time it will take for the police to complete their related investigations,” said Mr Clarke.

“The period of time was one in which we and our international partners were suddenly adapting to a completely new scale and type of threat from fundamentalist, religious extremists.

“Many UK intelligence officers had to operate in extraordinarily challenging environments subject to real personal danger. But everyone in the government and everyone in the agencies accept this bravery has to be combined with clear rules of proportionality, accountability, to ensure we uphold the values we are working hard to defend.

“While we accept intelligence operations must be conducted in the strictest secrecy, we also expect there to be strict oversight of those operations to ensure at all times they respect the human rights that are a cornerstone of this country’s values.”

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| Sir John Sawers: US spies ‘got so obsessed’ with right answer they resorted to torture!

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Sir John Sawers: US spies ‘got so obsessed’ with right answer they resorted to torture ~ , Senior Political Correspondent, The Telegraph.

The head of the Secret Intelligence Service also admitted that some of the activity of British agents when questioning alleged terrorists was “close to the line”.

Sir John’s comments come at a sensitive time for Britain’s intelligence service, which is being investigated by the Metropolitan Police over the alleged rendition of two Libyans. Sir John described the cases as “chilling”.

Sir John Sawers, head of the Secret Intelligence Service

Sir John Sawers, head of the Secret Intelligence Service  Photo: REUTERS

 

The Daily Telegraph understands that ministers have now received a copy of the evidence about any alleged British complicity in torture gathered by high court judge Sir Peter Gibson.

Ministers will tell MPs next week that they are combing through the evidence to ensure that its publication will not damage national security.

Sir John, who is known in Whitehall as “C”, described his agents as “secret squirrels” and said that there was “always a danger” that agents could go too far when questioning suspects.

Sir John, who is paid £170,000 a year, said: “There’s always a danger that, as a bunch of secret squirrels, you can get involved in something that takes you down a pathway where you end up in the wrong place.

“The Americans have done that over their interrogation techniques after 9/11. They got so obsessed with getting a right answer that they drifted into an area that kind of amounted to torture.

“We’ve never been there, we’ve never been involved in that, and I think our accountability, our disciplines, have helped us keep on the right side of these lines.

“It’s not always been easy. There are investigations gong on about things which are close to the line.”

In January, Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said Scotland Yard detectives had taken three years to decide there was insufficient evidence to bring charges in relation to claims by Guantánamo Bay detainees.

The Crown Prosecution Service and the Metropolitan police said they would look into claims that MI5 and MI6 were involved in the secret rendition of two Libyans back to Muammar Gaddafi‘s regime in 2004.

Sir John told an audience of senior civil servants at Civil Service Live, an event in Olympia, west London, it was important “to address the genuine challenges about the legality of the work we were doing immediately after 9/11”.

He added: “Countries were facing a huge new threat and all our people were out there trying to deal with that, but were they as well-prepared as they should have been?

“There are one or two chilling cases that are involved in a criminal investigation. We have to front up and say ‘yeah okay the police think this is sufficiently serious for them to investigate it and we have to co-operate 100 per cent’.”

Sir John also commented on the death in 2010 of Gareth Williams, the GCHQ official whose body was found in a holdall in the bath of his flat in London when he was on secondment to MI6 at its Vauxhall headquarters.

In comments reported by Civil Service World magazine, he said: “We admit our weaknesses in SIS and one of the first things you have to do when a management failure [occurs] is face up to that, not give a series of explanatory reasons. There is always an explanation.”

Sir John also said in the wake of Mr Williams’ death he had instructed his senior staff to spend up to a quarter of their time managing other people.

He said: “Sometimes there’s an attitude – and I find it in parts of my service – where management is seen as something for your spare time, not the day job.

“The day job is operations, or delivering intelligence, or whatever it is. But actually I tell people: ‘management is the core of your job, and you can deliver a whole lot more through other people than you can through yourself on your own’.”