Events | 2009.10.15
End of the rendition apologists | Andrew Tyrie
Cameron must launch an inquiry into the rendition scandal to help restore Britain\'s moral standing
The rendition scandal – the discovery that Britain has facilitated kidnap and torture as part of George Bush\'s programme of extraordinary rendition provides David Cameron with an opportunity to take a lead on foreign policy. It is a chance for him to show how much the Conservative party has changed, after a mistaken period as apologists for the Bush administration, and that the party has decisively broken with neoconservatism. In doing so, he can also make a contribution to bolstering the moral authority of Britain and the west.
Cameron should make it clear that getting to the bottom of rendition is a matter of fundamental principles. What kind of country do we want to live in? One that is prepared to turn a blind eye to, or even find itself complicit in, kidnap and torture? We owe answers to the British public, who have been fobbed off with misleading and opaque statements from the government. Cameron has already stepped in this direction by supporting Lord Carlile, the government\'s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, in his calls for an investigation. Cameron now needs to go further and clarify that an incoming Conservative government will immediately launch a comprehensive inquiry.
To restore public confidence, its terms of reference, as a minimum, should require it to achieve three things. First, it must provide maximum possible disclosure. So far, the UK government has been extremely reluctant to address Britain\'s involvement in rendition. This is a mistake. The trickle of revelations has been hugely damaging to the UK\'s reputation. The primary purpose of an inquiry should not be to elicit information with the intention of prosecuting. It should be to get to the truth. An inquiry must also give proponents of extraordinary rendition the chance to make their case – that rendition and other aggressive policies yielded vital, life-saving intelligence. It can also lay to rest some of the wilder claims that have been made about rendition and British participation.
Second, an inquiry must not only find out what happened, but how it was allowed to happen. The British legal and administrative deficiencies that permitted participation in, and facilitation of, extraordinary rendition, need to be rectified. The inquiry should be asked to advise on how to toughen up the law in the UK. The public must have confidence that the legal framework in place to prevent British involvement in rendition is sufficiently robust.
As for the administrative deficiencies – on issues ranging from detainee handovers in Iraq, to the use of Diego Garcia – ministers misled parliament and the public, and have had to admit that their previous assurances, and those on which they had relied from the US administration, were worthless. How did the UK civil service leave ministers so badly briefed and exposed? We need to know.
Third, the inquiry must also address the problem of "hard cases". We should not assume that we can necessarily defend ourselves with current domestic and international law. What is a western country to do when reliable intelligence suggests that an individual in a failed state, with which no extradition treaty exists and which does not possess an effective domestic legal structure, means it harm? There must be a way to detain such people within some due process of law. Rendition should be towards justice, not away from it, as the Bush programme of extraordinary rendition operated. We need an international consensus on this.
A well-run and thorough British inquiry could greatly influence policy in the US. On rendition, candidate Barack Obama took the high ground of ethical principle. In office, President Obama is wrestling with the dilemmas of reconciling this position with the hard realities of national security. As Mario Cuomo famously remarked: "You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose." The US needs a full inquiry too.
Rather than sitting meekly by, as the British government has done in recent years – tainted by Tony Blair\'s wrong-headed enthusiasm for hawkish neoconservatism – an incoming Conservative government can provide a measure of leadership from this side of the Atlantic and help put back together the western alliance, fractured by Donald Rumsfeld \'s divisive "coalition of the willing". Extraordinary rendition became a symbol for much that was wrong with American foreign policy in the years after 9/11. British complicity in it is a sign of how UK foreign policy has also slipped its moorings. Obama is a multilateralist. He wants a consensus. In office, the Conservatives need to help him build it.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]07/end-of-rendition-apologists
