It is hardly surprising that parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee – which consists of MPs and peers hand-picked by the Prime Minister – is fast becoming the Government’s white-washing body of choice. Despite its purported role in providing scrutiny and oversight of the intelligence services, it is in fact far more often a cheerleader than a watchdog.
Worse still, it has completely missed the major scandals of the past decade, which it was meant to guard against: a full three years after UK agents were intimately involved in the 2004 kidnap and ‘rendition’ to torture of Gaddafi opponents – pregnant wives and young children included – the ISC gave our spies a clean bill of health. There is “no evidence that the UK Agencies were complicit in any ‘Extraordinary Rendition’ operations,” they wrote happily in 2007 – without any apparent awareness that three years previously, MI6’s Sir Mark Allen had cheerfully congratulated Gaddafi’s spy chief on the arrival of the “air cargo” – Mr Belhadj and his wife Fatima Boudchar – and stressed that the intelligence that got them there “was British.”
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