What everyone had assumed to be on some level true and yet tried to avoid thinking particularly hard about may be have some light shed on its ugly features – Jack Straw has been personally sued for complicity in the rendition of Abdel Hakim Belhadj. Belhadj’s account of what happened to him has neither been confirmed or denied by the UK, but one way or another he disappeared in Bangkok back in 2004 and wound up in a Libyan jail soon after.
The choice of suing Jack Straw as an individual is an interesting one; it will be harder to simply hold inquiries until the public loses interest, as shown by the fact that police have already questioned Straw. Straw himself has at times denied all knowledge of torture, claimed that he could not possibly have known about everything British intelligence was up to and grumbled about troublesome freedom of information laws.
Taken together, Straw’s responses have an awkward feel for the single reason that at no point has he denied that rendition and torture took place. His claim that ‘no foreign secretary can know all the details of what its intelligence agencies are doing at any one time’ is bizarre; Belhadj’s abduction involved the participation of at least four governments (Britain, America, Thailand and Libya), and risked a lot of political capital. The idea that MI6 could have carried out such an operation without the government even knowing about it is absurd.
The reality is almost certainly that the UK is simply desperate to avoid a confrontation with America. Any serious investigation into what went on during the height of the ‘war on terror’ would inevitably expose some degree of American involvement, something that MI6 effectively admitted when it protested that public legal action against Straw could ‘damage international relations’.
The fact is that the UK is still America’s poodle when it comes to torture, rendition and other nastiness perpetrated by intelligence services. Even if the UK’s agents were never physically involved, which is unlikely, the government was and in all likelihood still is complicit through inaction. The UK simply does not have the clout to stand up to America, even if the government wanted to.
Barack Obama’s election has allowed people to forget the extent of British and American cooperation, and its horrible excesses. The question is whether the police investigation that began after Belhadj’s made his allegations about Straw will be obliged to abide by the same code of silence. British judiciary has ignored American interests and diplomatic concerns once before, in the case of another Libyan, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, whose (very questionable) release by the Scottish government in 2009 from a life sentence for the Lockerbie bombing infuriated the US.
Could something similar happen in Belhadj’s case? If so, it would be the first investigation into rendition by a group that is not directly implicated in it, and has the potential to force some uncomfortable questions to be asked in US and elsewhere. It will also probably deal great damage to the reputation of the British security services, which is a price worth paying to save the credibility of the British government as a whole. A refusal to seriously investigate allegations of torture against a British politician would add to the (considerable) international cynicism about the UK’s stances on a range of issues from human rights to corruption. Telling the truth, however ugly, is always the better option in the long run.
