Ministers 'knew about rendition flights'

I have written before about how the British government are simply lying when they state that they do not know whether CIA flights into and out of Britain contain prisoners being ferreted around the world to US interrogation centres or to other country's where they may be tortured. The process, known as extraordinary rendition, has been the subject of an EU enquiry and it's findings have been recently released.

The findings confirm what everyone thought.

European governments, including Britain, knew about secret CIA flights across the continent, MEPs concluded yesterday, as they lambasted politicians and senior officials for failing to co-operate with an inquiry into secret US renditions.

Of course, Britain decided not to co-operate with the inquiry, which is as good a way of admitting guilt as I can think of.

Britain's former defence secretary Geoff Hoon, now minister for Europe, was criticised in a report which "deplored" the way he co-operated with a committee investigating claims that the CIA operated secret flights in the EU and set up covert prisons on European soil.

Overall the UK emerged as one of the countries which tolerated a significant number of "black flights" and failed to assist British citizens who were abducted in other countries.

The document, agreed yesterday, expressed "serious concern about the 170 stopovers made by CIA-operated aircraft at UK airports, which on many occasions came from or were bound for countries linked with extraordinary rendition circuits and the transfer of detainees". It deplored "the stopovers at UK airports of aircraft which have been shown to have been used by the CIA", on other occasions, for "extraordinary renditions".

Not content with allowing such activities to take place within Britain, the Foreign Office adviser Michael Wood managed to outrage the enquiry further when he gave his legal opinion "according to which receiving or possessing information extracted under torture, as long as there is no direct participation in the torture, is not prohibited".

So Britain is not only turning a blind eye while suspects are brought through here on their way to Guantanamo or some other secret Gulag where they may or may not be tortured, we will also happily accept any information that this torture produces and not feel the least bit sullied as, after all, we had "no direct participation in the torture".

Can there possibly be a more repellent, morally vacuous stance than the one Blair's government has adopted?

The man who came into power promising a government that would be "whiter than white" has said nothing about this enquiry's findings, just as he miraculously managed to find somewhere else to be the other day whilst the Commons debated the Iraq war.

However, the fact that he has enabled people to be flown to legal black holes, where they have languished without access to lawyers for the best part of five years is a stain on his reputation that time will not erase. And to think that we find it acceptable to accept intelligence gleaned in such a way and to imagine that we are not sullied because "we have not tortured anyone" reveals him to be morally bankrupt.

That both he and Bush can indulge in this kind of behaviour whilst continuing as practising Christians simply baffles me. That he can take part in this when he, himself, is a trained barrister appals me. They should disbar him.

The year-long investigation into CIA activities has established enough circumstantial evidence to corroborate widespread reports of secret rendition, the report's authors say.

The committee set up to investigate the claims interviewed witnesses and obtained information from Eurocontrol, the EU's air safety agency, which revealed that more than 1,200 undeclared CIA flights entered European airspace after 11 September 2001.

The inquiry concluded: "It is implausible, on the basis of the testimonies and documents received, that certain European governments were not aware of the activities linked to extraordinary rendition on their territory". It was also "implausible that many hundreds of flights ...could have taken place without the knowledge of either the security services or the intelligence services".

They knew. All along. They knew. And they lied to us about it. And Tony's a lawyer. So he knew just how illegal what he was participating in was.

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tag: Blair, rendition flights, Guantanamo Bay, interrogation techniques, waterboarding, torture, extraordinary rendition