Britain's failure to come clean over rendition is scandalous – Tory MP.
Andrew Tyrie says CPS should provide parliamentary committee with information on UK role in abducting terror suspects.
A leading Conservative MP has described the failure of government agencies over a decade to come clean about Britain’s role in rendition – secretly seizing and jailing terror suspects and alleged Islamist extremists – as a scandal, saying it was crucial to find out who was responsible.
Andrew Tyrie, chair of the all-party parliamentary group on extraordinary rendition, said it was essential the Crown Prosecution Service provides a committee of MPs and peers with the evidence it gathered before it decided not to bring criminal charges.
“Responsibility for the facilitation of rendition should not have been allowed to fall through the cracks,” Tyrie said in a letter to Dominic Grieve, the chair of the parliamentary intelligence and security committee (ISC) and former attorney general.
He added: “That it has done so and for a decade is, frankly, a scandal. It is now crucial to find out who authorised these operations and how.”
The ISC was asked by David Cameron to investigate MI6’s role in rendering terror suspects and alleged extremists – specifically the abduction in 2004 of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami al-Saadi, two Libyan opponents of the former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. The two men were subsequently tortured despite Gaddafi’s apparent assurances to UK officials that they would not be mistreated.
Cameron handed the task to the ISC though he insisted when he became prime minister in 2010 it should be undertaken by a judge-led inquiry. The ISC had already cleared British security and intelligence agencies of any wrongdoing. It later emerged that MI6 and other government agencies had withheld vital information from the ISC.
Evidence of Britain’s involvement emerged after Nato bombs destroyed the offices of Gaddafi’s intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa. One document found there was a letter to Moussa Koussa from Sir Mark Allen, the head of MI6’s counter-terrorist operations giving details of MI6’s role in the abductions that were carried out in cooperation with the CIA.
The then head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, was so incensed when she discovered the role played by MI6 in the abductions that she threw out a number of the agency’s staff and banned them from working at MI5’s headquarters in London, Thames House.
She also wrote to the then prime minister, Tony Blair, to complain about the conduct of MI6 officers, saying their actions had threatened Britain’s intelligence-gathering operations and may have compromised the security and safety of MI5 officers and their informants.
In June, the CPS announced Allen would not face charges. Sue Hemming, the head of the CPS’s special crime and counter-terrorism division, said at the time: “Following a thorough investigation, the CPS has decided that there is insufficient evidence to charge the suspect with any criminal offence.” She added: “We made our decision based upon all the available admissible evidence and after weighing up all of the information we have been provided with.”
Government prosecutors concluded Allen had been in contact with countries that detained Belhaj and al-Saadi in 2004 as they were secretly flown to Libya and had “sought political authority for some of his actions”.
Tyrie, who is chair of the cross-party House of Commons Treasury select committee as well as the committee on extraordinary rendition, has told Grieve it was essential for the ISC to see papers relating to Operation Lydd, Scotland Yard’s investigation into the affair. Jack Straw, the then foreign secretary who was responsible for MI6, was interviewed by the police as a potential witness.
Evidence the CPS gathered as part of Operation Lydd “will be vital in understanding what went wrong and by whom”, Tyrie told Grieve.
The ISC should “require permanent secretaries of all relevant departments and agencies, including the security services, personally to certify that they have taken all reasonable steps to supply [the ISC] with all relevant information held by their respective departments,” Tyrie said. The committee must also “examine the issue of detainee transfers in Iraq and Afghanistan”, he added.
British courts have heard how detainees have been handed over to US forces and Afghan security services, in some cases in breach of the law.
Tyrie said the ISC should also take reasonable steps to obtain relevant information held by foreign agencies, a reference, among others, to the CIA. “There has to be an extremely good reason for withholding anything from the ISC on something as serious as this,” Tyrie told the Guardian.
In its latest annual report in July, the ISC described its investigations into rendition operations as a “detailed and long-term inquiry into an important issue [which] is expected to occupy the committee for some time”.