Only a proper judicial inquiry into the UK's alleged role in torture and rendition will have the means to extract the truth
Sir Peter Gibson's inquiry, which limped to a halt last week with the news of a fresh round of police investigations into official complicity in torture, has been decently put out of its misery. Promising that there would – one day – be a judge-led inquiry into this most shameful episode in recent history, in the Commons the justice secretary Ken Clarke pronounced Sir Peter's investigations beyond resuscitation, fatally undermined by last week's news that there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against security or intelligence personnel in a series of cases involving British detainees, and the launch of a new police investigation into charges that Britain had rendered suspected terrorists to Libya, where they had been tortured. But an inquiry must come, and it must come with stronger powers and greater transparency than the Gibson inquiry managed to secure.
It is now more than six years since the Guardian first reported indications of complicity, when it found that CIA flights were refuelling at British airports as they flew prisoners across the world to countries where torture was used. The reports marked the beginning of a prolonged confrontation between the rule of law and the war on terror, one that remains unresolved. After the supreme court ruled last July that closed hearings, where defendants would not be entitled to know the evidence against them, were a breach of a fundamental common law right, it seems in the courts the rule of law has triumphed. But in the murky politics of the war on terror, a sustained rearguard action by the security and intelligence services, in alliance with civilian Whitehall itself, is perilously close to gaining the upper hand. The two questions Gibson's inquiry had to answer were whether British agencies knowingly and therefore illegally returned suspects to countries where they might be tortured, and whether politicians – expressly, the foreign secretaries at the time, Jack Straw and David Miliband – knew about it, the enormity of which could destroy a career.
David Cameron promised that the Gibson inquiry "would get to the bottom of it". It soon emerged that there were a lot of people around determined to ensure it wouldn't. The inquiry took more than a year to be constituted and, when it was, it was on terms that human rights and civil liberties organisations could not accept: those who alleged torture would not be allowed to question those they believed had been complicit in their abuse, while the publication of material would be a matter for Whitehall's capo di tutti capi, the cabinet secretary. By then WikiLeaks had revealed pages of incriminating material that suggested politicians had a much greater awareness of what was going on than had ever been admitted. And, just a few months later, triumphant Libyan rebels raiding government offices in Tripoli uncovered a letter from the then head of MI6, Mark Allen, which suggested that in 2004 he had been directly involved in the rendition of two prominent Libyan dissidents. It is those cases the police are now investigating.
There are two things going on here. One is the slow erosion of the compulsive secrecy that has always surrounded security operations. It is still less than a generation ago that the very existence of MI5 and MI6 was an official secret. Unsurprisingly, embedding them in the processes of democracy has induced a kind of culture shock. Balancing security and openness is a very tough act, especially in the wake of an atrocity like 9/11. But without it, the trust that is the critical element of their success will continue to weaken.
Essential to this is accountability. Britain has a damaging history of denial. This is the second process that is under way: the painful extraction of the truth from the British political establishment. Gibson did not have the tools to do it. It will be a triumph rare in this sort of case if the police find enough evidence to bring charges; even convictions would amount only to a partial victory. In the end, there will be no alternative to a proper judicial inquiry, and it must come sooner rather than later.