Special report: Rendition ordeal that raises new questions about secret trials

The Guardian
Ian Cobain

In 2004, Fatima Bouchar and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, were detained en route to the UK, and rendered to Libya. This is the story of their imprisonment, and the trail of evidence that reveals the involvement of the British government

Just when Fatima Bouchar thought it couldn't get any worse, the Americans forced her to lie on a stretcher and began wrapping tape around her feet. They moved upwards, she says, along her legs, winding the tape around and around, binding her to the stretcher. They taped her stomach, her arms and then her chest. She was bound tight, unable to move.

Bouchar says there were three Americans: two tall, thin men and an equally tall woman. Mostly they were silent. She never saw their faces: they dressed in black and always wore black balaclavas. Bouchar was terrified. They didn't stop at her chest – she says they also wound the tape around her head, covering her eyes. Then they put a hood and earmuffs on her. She was unable to move, to hear or to see. "My left eye was closed when the tape was applied," she says, speaking about her ordeal for the first time. "But my right eye was open, and it stayed open throughout the journey. It was agony." The journey would last around 17 hours.

Bouchar, then aged 30, had become a victim of the process known as extraordinary rendition. She and her husband, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, a Libyan Islamist militant fighting Muammar Gaddafi, had been abducted in Bangkok and were being flown to one of Gaddafi's prisons in Libya, a country where she had never before set foot. However, Bouchar's case is different from the countless other renditions that the world has learned about over the past few years, and not just because she was one of the few female victims.

Documents discovered in Tripoli show that the operation was initiated by British intelligence officers, rather than the masked Americans or their superiors in the US. There is also some evidence that the operation may have been linked to a second British-initiated operation, which saw two men detained in Iraq and rendered to Afghanistan. Furthermore, the timing of the operation, and the questions that Bouchar's husband and a second rendition victim say were subsequently put to them under torture, raise disturbing new questions about the secret court system that considers immigration appeals in terrorist cases in the UK – a system that the government has pledged to extend to civil trials in which the government itself is the defendant.

THE 800 PAGE LOCKEBIE REPORT THAT EXONERATES LIBYA

Libya 360˙
Alexandria

The explosive report on the man convicted of the Lockerbie atrocity and why we are publishing it after five years of secrecy

Lucy Adams and John Ashton

The Sunday Herald publishes the full 800-page report detailing why the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing could have walked free.

SCOTTISH CRIMINAL CASES REVIEW COMMISSION STATEMENT OF REASONS UNDER SECTION 194D (4) OF THE CRIMINAL PROCEDURE (SCOTLAND) ACT 1995
The controversial report from the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC) has remained secret for five years because, until now, no-one had permission to publish it.

The Sunday Herald and its sister paper, The Herald, are the only newspapers in the world to have seen the report. We choose to publish it because we have the permission of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Libyan convicted of the bombing, and because we believe it is in the public interest to disseminate the whole document.

The Sunday Herald has chosen to publish the full report online today to allow the public to see for themselves the analysis of the evidence which could have resulted in the acquittal of Megrahi. Under Section 32 of the Data Protection Act, journalists can publish in the public interest. We have made very few redactions to protect the names of confidential sources and private information.

The publication of the report adds weight to calls for a full public inquiry into the atrocity – something for which many of the relatives have been campaigning for more than two decades.

Megrahi has also sent a copy of the full report to Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill, who released him on compassionate grounds in August 2009.

Jonathan Mitchell QC told the Sunday Herald: “From a data-protection point of view, it is questionable whether this report is the ‘personal data’ of anyone other than Megrahi.”

The Data Protection Act was described as “one of the most poorly drafted pieces of legislation on the statute book” by Tom Hickman, a barrister at Blackstone Chambers, on a UK Constitutional Law Group website.

Mitchell believes the Sunday Herald is not constrained from publishing the report. He said: ‘‘Section 32 of the Data Protection Act has the effect – putting it shortly – that processing (which includes publication) of personal data, even sensitive personal data, is exempt from the relevant data-protection principles if it is for the purpose of journalism and the newspaper reasonably believes that, having regard in particular to the special importance of the public interest in freedom of expression, ‘publication would be in the public interest’, and also reasonably believes that compliance with data-protection principles such as non-disclosure would be incompatible with the journalistic function.”

The Herald revealed earlier this month that, according to the report, the Crown failed to disclose seven key items of evidence that led to the Lockerbie case being referred back for a fresh appeal.
The SCCRC rejected many of the defence submissions but upheld six grounds which could have constituted a miscarriage of justice.

The commission made clear that, had such information been shared with the defence, the result of the trial could have been different.

Centuries of open justice threatened by secret courts

The Independent
Andy McSmith and Kim Sengupta

Government rewrites judicial principles after lobbying by CIA

Secret justice looks set to be a regular feature of British courts and tribunals when the intelligence services want to protect their sources of information.

Civil courts, immigration panels and even coroner's inquests would go into secret session if the Government rules that hearing evidence in public could be a threat to national security.

The proposals, which run counter to a centuries-old British tradition of open justice, were introduced to a sparsely attended House of Commons yesterday by the Justice Secretary, Ken Clarke – and met almost no opposition. The planned changes to the British justice system follow lobbying of the Government by the CIA.

Civil rights groups warned a serious potential threat to individual liberty lurked behind the all-party consensus.

Mr Clarke is seeking to protect the Government from a repeat of a fiasco which has cost tens of millions of pounds and led to a breakdown in co-operation between British intelligence and an enraged CIA.

The best-known case involved Binyam Mohamed, a British resident who was held in Guantanamo Bay for five years, and started a claim for damages from the UK Government, which he accused of complicity in torture.

The Court of Appeal released a summary of CIA intelligence which supported Mr Mohamed's claim that British intelligence officers knew about the torture of suspected terrorists.

The CIA was furious and halted the flow of information from its headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and other US agencies apart from in the most serious cases. MI6 and the Foreign Office also received complaints from a number of other allied states anxious that information provided on a confidential basis would leak into the public domain.

Faced with irate colleagues at Langley, the British Government paid out to 16 terrorist suspects, to prevent further damage to US-UK relations. Yesterday, Mr Clarke let slip that the cases had already cost around £20m. Another 30 are in prospect because, he told MPs, "it is becoming fashionable" to challenge the Government in court.

Officials have privately complained that they cannot defend these cases without compromising sensitive intelligence, which means suspected terrorists have been able to use the civil courts as a "cashpoint".

If Mr Clarke's proposals are agreed, the power of the courts to order the intelligence services to disclose sensitive material will be curtailed. The Government is also planning to pass a law giving itself much more latitude to use what are called "closed material proceedings" in civil court cases and immigration tribunals, meaning the people at the centre of such cases would not be allowed to hear any evidence that MI5 or MI6 did not want them to hear. The material would, however, be examined by special advocates with security clearance.

There is also the prospect of grieving relatives being security vetted before they are allowed into inquests in cases which might involve sensitive material, such as the death of a terrorist suspect. If they refuse to be vetted, they would be barred.

Mr Clarke went out of his way to avoid a clash with Labour by reminding them that he was dealing with a problem they had to face in government, and emphasising that his Green Paper was "very green".

Mr Clarke told MPs: "The Government is clear that under the current system, justice is not being served and our national security is being put at risk. For justice to be done and the rule of law to be upheld, courts should be able to consider all the facts of the case. At the moment, we are not always getting at the truth because some evidence is too sensitive to disclose in open court."