19th November 2010
A Line Drawn – A Truth Denied
Mark Hanson
The Government will be hoping that a final line has been drawn under the long-running saga that is Britain’s involvement in the US extraordinary rendition programme.
The Justice Secretary, Kenneth Clark, has announced that the 16 former Guantanamo Bay detainees that were suing the British Government will receive substantial payouts in a detailed settlement that has been said to be beneficial to all sides.
The government has argued that it could not risk the exposure of secret documents in court, and had come under intense pressure from MI5 and MI6 to find a way of preventing such disclosure. The court actions that had been brought by Binyam Mohamed and others would have possibly continued for another 5 years, costing millions in legal fees and resources.
Yet although there has been talk of an independent inquiry into the grave allegations that British agents colluded in the torturing of the men, and the role of the British government in the US sponsored extraordinary rendition programme, it is hard not to look upon the payments as a “buying off”.
The settlement agreement has within it a mutually binding confidentiality clause, which means that the important evidence of Mohamed and the others may possibly be unavailable to any inquiry, and the details of the serious allegations and events of the torture and rendition remain forever unknown.
The questions that remain are deeply important, not least the degree to which Tony Blair and his government knew of, or sanctioned, the collusion of torture. Numerous necessary pieces of evidence have already been withheld, and the present government seems, in wanting to protect the UK’s reputation, to be denying any real justice for those who have undergone terrible ordeals as part of the dangerously misguided “war on terror”.
Bribery is a dirty word. Yet, seemingly, it lives on in modern day Britain.
