Documents discovered in September in the abandoned office of former Libyan head of intelligence Musa Kusa shine the spotlight once again on Britain’s active collusion with the illegal rendition of terrorism suspects and their subsequent torture. It is grimly appropriate that such evidence should surface on the tenth anniversary of 9/11: the declaration of the ‘war on terror’ by the United States and Britain that followed the 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre in New York ushered in an era of officially-sanctioned torture, kidnap, forced disappearances, ghost prisons and, in effect, the shredding of every international and national treaty or law governing the treatment of prisoners of war. The papers uncovered by Human Rights Watch in Tripoli, Libya are but one example of that shameful slide into a moral and legal vacuum. Cat Wiener reports.
Collusion with rendition and torture
One CIA memo found amongst the cache states: ‘Our service has become aware that last weekend [Libyan Islamic Fighting Group] deputy Emir Abu Munthir and his spouse and children were being held in Hong Kong detention for immigration/passport violations…We are also aware that your service had been co-operating with the British to effect Abu Munthir’s removal to Tripoli’. Abu Munthir was rendered to Tripoli in 2004. His fate and that of his family remain unknown. Abdul Hakim Belhaj – now commander of an anti-Gaddafi militia in Tripoli – was also rendered to Tripoli by the CIA in 2004, on intelligence, provided by Britain, and tortured by the Gaddafi government. MI6’s head of counter-terrorism at the time, Sir Mark Allen, sent a friendly note to Musa Kusa, congratulating him on the safe arrival of Belhadj and commenting ‘This was the least we could do for you’.
These revelations are acutely embarrassing for the British government, following Britain’s recent demonisation of the Gaddafi regime to justify ‘regime change’. They are, however, par for the imperialist course.
The lies and crimes of Jack Straw
Confronted with the revelations about Libya, Jack Straw, Labour Foreign Secretary from 2001 to 2006, claimed disingenuously that ‘no foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time’. The lie was exposed when officials in Whitehall stated that the MI6 role had ‘ministerial approval’ – but then Straw has form on this. In 2005, he lied to parliament when confronted with evidence that Britain had allowed over 200 CIA torture flights to refuel at British airports, saying:
‘Unless we all start to believe in conspiracy theories and that the officials are lying, that I am lying, that behind this is some kind of secret state which is in league with some dark forces in the United States…there is simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition, full stop’. Last year documents in the case brought by former Guantanamo detainees against the British government showed that the illegal rendition of British citizens from Afghanistan to Guantanamo was Straw’s ‘preferred option’, and that he requested that rendition of suspects held at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan – a notorious torture centre – be delayed until they could be questioned by MI5.
Rewriting the rules
‘The new paradigm [of the war on terrorism] renders obsolete Geneva’s strict limitations on the questioning of enemy combatants’ (Alberto Gonzales, legal adviser to President Bush, 2001).
The reality is that after September 2001, as US President George Bush said, the gloves were off. A new lexicon was invented: ‘enemy combatants’, denied the protection provided by the Geneva Conventions to prisoners of war, could be picked up anywhere on the global battlefield of the war on terror. The concept of ‘torture’ itself was redefined to permit just about any cruel, degrading and violent treatment short of organ failure and death. ‘Extraordinary rendition’ was in fact the kidnapping and illegal transfer of detainees to detention facilities in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, or a web of secret CIA ‘dark’ prisons around the world into which at least a hundred people have simply disappeared.
In Britain too, as Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair put it, ‘the rules have changed’. New, secret official policy was drawn up by senior government lawyers and security services chiefs and sanctioned at the highest levels of government. In direct contravention of the Geneva Conventions, international human rights legislation and British domestic law, the new guidance made it clear that while agents must be at pains not to be seen to condone torture, if detainees ‘are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene’. Guidance given to intelligence officers in January 2002 specified, ‘The importance of the information being sought must be balanced against “the level of mistreatment anticipated”’.
And so by such sleight of hand the ‘outsourcing’ of torture was enshrined. In 2009, Craig Murray, who was British ambassador to Uzbekistan between 2002 and 2004, said that when he raised concern about British collusion with the CIA in the torture of suspects: ‘I was told that it had been decided that as a matter of War on Terror policy we should now obtain intelligence from torture, following discussions between Jack Straw and [MI6 chief] Richard Dearlove… beyond any doubt, the British government has for at least six years had a considered but secret policy of co-operation with torture abroad. This policy was cleared by the government legal advisers and approved by Jack Straw as Secretary of State’.
Bring Labour war criminals to justice
David Cameron has said the issue of the Libyan documents will be referred to the Gibson Detainee Inquiry, set up in 2010 in an attempt to stem the deeply incriminating flow of evidence of British collusion with illegal rendition and torture. But human rights organisations and lawyers for former detainees have withdrawn their cooperation: both MI5 and MI6 will give evidence in secret, preventing any of those subjected to such abuse from challenging their version of events and witnesses, such as government ministers, cannot be compelled to attend. Peter Gibson, chair of the inquiry, previously served as commissioner for the intelligence services. Whatever evidence is published will be decided by the government. The Detainee Inquiry is a pathetic and craven cover-up for the litany of war crimes committed over the last ten years; the only real justice would be to bring the perpetrators to justice, starting with Tony Blair and Jack Straw.
FRFI 223 October/November 2011
