London: MI6 (British intelligence) officers were under no obligation to report breaches of the Geneva conventions and turned a “blind eye” to the torture of detainees in foreign jails, according to the report into Britain’s involvement in rendition of terror suspects.
Even when individual MI6 and MI5 (the British security service) officers expressed concerns about the abuse of detainees they did not pass on their thoughts for fear of offending the US, Britain’s closest intelligence partner.
And British officials were reluctant to express concern about sleep deprivation, hooding, and waterboarding for “fear of damaging liaison relationships” — an unmistakable reference to the CIA.
This is the clear message of the 115-page report by a panel led by Sir Peter Gibson, the former appeal court judge, into Britain’s involvement in the extra-judicial abduction of terror suspects who were flown in secret to prisons where they were ill treated.
The Gibson inquiry was set up by the coalition government in 2010 following increasing evidence of British complicity in CIA-led operations involving UK citizens and residents who ended up incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay.
The inquiry was cut short in January last year amid dramatic, firsthand, evidence of MI6 involvement in another rendition, that of two prominent Libyan dissidents, Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami Al Saadi.
The Libyan operation is the subject of a police investigation proceeding now, and since the same intelligence agencies and some of the same individuals - notably Jack Straw, the former foreign secretary - were potential witnesses, the Gibson inquiry was abandoned.
Despite promises by the prime minister, David Cameron, and the former justice secretary, Ken Clarke, that investigations would be continued by an independent, judge-led, inquiry, the government told the House of Commons yesterday that it had handed over the task to the intelligence and security committee of selected MPs and peers.
The Gibson report depicts Britain’s security and intelligence agencies as being totally unprepared for the US response to the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington in 2001.
US agencies, notably the CIA, picked up terror suspects, or “enemy combatants”, as the Bush administration called them, and secretly rendered them to foreign jails, where they were abused and tortured, and eventually sent to Guantanamo Bay.
Straw told MPs yesterday that in January 2002 he agreed that the UK should not stand in the way of British nationals detained by the US in Afghanistan being transferred to Guantanamo.
He said parliament should never forget the context, given that the allegations of torture arose in the “aftermath of the world’s most appalling terrorist atrocity ever, on the 11 September 2001”. However, the report reveals that in December 2001 Straw suggested to David Blunkett, then home secretary (interior minister), that an extradition bill then going through parliament should be amended to allow detainees to be rendered to Britain.
The Gibson report makes it clear that years after MI5 and MI6 realised what the US agencies, notably the CIA, were up to, the organisations continued to cooperate with interrogations even though they knew, or strongly suspected, that detainees were being abused.
The Gibson report provides a list of unanswered questions, including whether MI6 officers “may have turned a blind eye to the use of specific, inappropriate, techniques or threats used by others, and used this to their advantage when resuming an interview session with a now compliant detainee”. Guardian News
