Peter Oborne writes:
Hallelujah! Next week Sir John Chilcot will
finally send his two-million-word-long report on the Iraq war to David Cameron.
The news — confirmed in Parliament
on Thursday — brings to an end this long-running scandal. Seven years have
passed since Sir John’s report was commissioned — and it will be delivered more
than five years late.
There is, however, an equally
serious stain on Britain’s integrity concerning alleged crimes committed during
the Blair years that will also shortly start to bubble to the surface.
This concerns torture — and in
particular a police investigation into British involvement 12 years ago in the
kidnap and subsequent treatment of Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, an exiled Libyan politician,
who was suspected of connections with Al-Qaeda.
Briefly, Belhaj — a known dissident of Libya’s Colonel Gaddafi — was living in
China in 2004 when he decided to seek asylum in Britain.
While en route here, he was
abducted at Bangkok airport in Thailand by U.S. authorities — after a reported
tip-off by British intelligence — and flown to Libya to be locked up and
tortured.
The police started looking into the
case more than four years ago.
Alison Saunders, Director of Public Prosecutions
at the Crown Prosecution Service, must decide whether to prosecute. If she gives the green light, it
will lead to one of the most sensational trials in British political history.
We could see a former Foreign
Secretary, Jack Straw, in the dock, charged as a participant or accessory to
the Common Law offence of kidnapping, as well as a statutory offence of torture
under the Criminal Justice Act 1988.
This carries a maximum penalty of life
imprisonment.
We could also see a former senior
MI6 officer, Sir Mark Allen, charged with the same set of offences. It is not
inconceivable that Mr Straw and Sir Mark could appear alongside one another as
co-defendants.
The police investigation into the Belhaj case followed a chance discovery by
Human Rights Watch as they wandered through Colonel Muammar Gaddafi’s Tripoli
after the dictator had been killed at the end of the 2011 Libyan uprising.
Amidst the ruins they found
correspondence between Sir Mark Allen, a senior MI6 officer, and Moussa Koussa,
Gaddafi’s head of Intelligence.
It suggested MI6 had helped in sending Belhaj
to Libya, where he was imprisoned and tortured.
He wrote: ‘This
is the least we could do for you and for Libya to demonstrate the remarkable
relationship we have built up over recent years.’
On the face of things, the case for
prosecution is compelling — especially as neither MI6 nor Sir Mark has
challenged the authenticity of the letters.
The possibility of such a trial
has, however, sent gasps of horror through Whitehall. This may help explain why
the criminal investigation has been subject to a series of inexplicable delays.
The police took more than two years to carry out their initial investigation
and I am told that they started to pass on their evidence to the Crown
Prosecution Service in the autumn of 2014.
Normally, it takes the CPS a few
months at most to decide whether or not to prosecute. Particularly, as in this
case, when the evidence — in the shape of Sir Mark’s letters — appears to be so
clear-cut.
Those who follow the case believe
there have been two principle causes of delay.
They say the first stems from
dramatically differing accounts of events from MI6 on the one hand, and the
Blair government on the other.
Those who understand how MI6 works
are adamant that patriotic British intelligence officers would never have
become involved in illegal activity — let alone kidnap or torture — without
clear approval or authority from at least a minister of Cabinet rank.
However, Jack Straw, who was Tony
Blair’s Foreign Secretary at the time Belhaj was abducted, has repeatedly
denied any knowledge of so-called extraordinary rendition — the official
euphemism for kidnapping and transporting someone for torture to a country
which tolerates such practices.
Mr Straw’s denial to Parliament
when he was Foreign Secretary could hardly have been more emphatic:
‘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 Secretary Rice [Condoleeza Rice, Secretary of State under George
W. Bush] is lying, there simply is no truth in the claims that the United
Kingdom has been involved in rendition, full stop.’
One can only feel great sympathy
for Alison Saunders, as she faces what is possibly the most momentous decision
of her time as Director of the CPS.
Should she prosecute a former
Foreign Secretary? A former senior British intelligence officer. Both? Or
should she let the matter rest?
For it is a near certainty that Ms
Saunders may come under pressure to scrap the case.
That would be known in higher legal
circles as the ‘Shawcross option’, after the post-war Labour Attorney General
Sir Hartley Shawcross, who once said:
‘It has never been a rule in this country
— I hope it never will be — that suspected criminal offences must automatically
be the subject of prosecution.’
Shawcross held that there are
circumstances where the public interest overrides the requirement that justice
must be seen to be done.
Versions of the Shawcross defence were subsequently applied to avoid the
prosecution of British soldiers during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
They
were also brought into play to halt a potential criminal prosecution of defence
giant BAE, following allegations it had been involved in bribery when trying to
sell arms to Saudi Arabia.
Many senior politicians and
security personnel would love to see the Shawcross option invoked for the
Belhaj case.
They maintain — and many would agree — that Sir Mark Allen and
Jack Straw are British patriots who would never sanction an immoral act.
But Alison Saunders must also
consider the message that using the Shawcross option would send across the
world.
Let’s recollect the circumstances
of Mr Belhaj’s abduction in more detail. He was with his pregnant wife in China
when they decided to seek asylum in Britain.
On trying to leave the country,
they were detained and deported to Malaysia where they were held for several
weeks, before being told they could travel to the UK — but only via Bangkok.
After being abducted by U.S.
authorities in Bangkok, they were brutally interrogated in a secret prison,
before being ‘rendered’ to Gaddafi’s torturers in Libya.
Belhaj’s pregnant wife was punched,
bound, and denied medical care, while Belhaj himself spent the subsequent six
years in jail — years in which he endured hideous punishment at the hand of
Gaddafi’s henchmen.
If the Sir Mark Allen
correspondence is authentic, we know the British state has potentially been
involved in a very serious crime indeed.
Can we just leave it at that? The fact is that the Belhaj case,
after all this time, is starting to look like yet another government cover-up.
I do not know the precise facts
that Alison Saunders must take into account as she contemplates her truly grave
decision.
But I sincerely believe we need to
come to terms with the truth about Britain’s involvement in torture during the
dark period when we were George W. Bush’s closest allies in the so-called War
on Terror.
It would send a dreadful message to
the world about British values were we to fail to do so.
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