https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/10/abdel-hakim-belhaj-rendition-who-did-it-mi6-scandal-same-old-excuse?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Yahoo_Mail
So we’ve apologised for Abdel Hakim Belhaj’s rendition. But who did it?
Today there was no admission of liability for the Libyan’s kidnap and torture, just the same old excuse about MI6 scandals
Jack Straw, then foreign secretary and responsible for MI6, told MPs in 2005: “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 … there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition.”
We now know, on the government’s own admission, that far from indulging in conspiracy theories, some of us were telling the truth. Thanks to Nato air strikes, and perhaps British bombs, clear evidence emerged that MI6 was directly complicit, indeed had helped to set up, the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a leading opponent of the Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, and Belhaj’s pregnant wife, Fatima Boudchar.
The bombs destroyed the Tripoli office of Gaddafi’s foreign intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa. His files were scattered. They included a letter from Mark Allen, MI6’s counter-terrorism chief, dated March 2004 – a year before Straw was assuring MPs – congratulating Koussa on the “safe arrival” of Belhaj.
Allen added: “This was the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built over recent years.” Though he noted that the CIA had provided the aircraft for the rendition operation, “the intelligence … was British”.
When the evidence emerged of British involvement in the operation, Straw explained: “No foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time.” He said today: “In every case where my approval was sought I assumed, and was entitled to assume, that the actions for which my approval was sought were lawful.”
Shortly before the rendition, in which Belhaj was shackled and his wife bound from head to toe throughout a 17-hour flight from Bangkok to Tripoli, Richard Dearlove, the head of MI6, led a high-powered delegation of intelligence officers to discuss close cooperation with Gaddafi and his security chiefs.
Whitehall officials have described the rendition of Belhaj and his wife as the result of “ministerially authorised government policy”. After a four-year police investigation, Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service announced that neither Straw nor Allen would face charges, because of insufficient evidence; though it said Allen had “sought political authority for some of his actions, albeit not within a formal written process nor in detail…”.
For six years government lawyers fought tooth and nail in the courts to prevent the disclosure of any more incriminating evidence. After today’s statement to MPs by the attorney general, Jeremy Wright, we are none the wiser about where the responsibility lies. In what he called an out-of-court “full and final settlement”, Wright emphasised that there was “no admission of liability”. ...
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