What we know now

In the years after 9/11, UK intelligence agencies were involved in 598 cases in which prisoners were tortured or placed at risk of mistreatment. Intelligence officers were giving consent, or watching the torture, or supplying questions and receiving answers. And this does not include the 2,000-3,000 interrogations they conducted at Guantánamo Bay.

We also know why the intelligence and security committee (ISC) believes this happened.

Immediately after 11 September, MI6, MI5 and the military were anxious to protect the UK and its interests against attacks by al-Qaida. Initially, individual officers lacked training and experience.

Nobody wanted to deter the US from sharing intelligence. By 2004, the report said, senior people in government could no longer ignore what was happening.

The Guardian has been investigating this matter since 2005, at a time when the ISC was taking little interest. The first of the committee’s two thorough and candid reports published on Thursday made it clear that MI5 and MI6 were engaged by this time in the rendition business on their own account.

MI5 helped finance a rendition operation in June 2003. In October 2004, the then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, authorised the payment of a large share of the cost of rendering two people from one country to another.

Last month, Theresa May apologised to Abdel Hakim Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, for MI6’s role in their kidnap, rendition and torture.

Who was to blame?

The committee is quite clear about Straw’s role in the October 2004 rendition. After the two people had been rendered, MI6 fed questions to be put to them, but did not seek direct access, so the UK’s involvement remained hidden.

Beyond this, responsibility remains obscure. May prevented the committee from interviewing junior officers, so we will never know what pressure they might have come under from middle-ranking officers. Similarly, middle-ranking officers were barred from speaking about senior officers.

What the ISC did find was evidence that the agencies did not tell ministers what they knew about the mistreatment of terrorism suspects for years after 11 September, and ministers appear rarely to have asked.

What is the risk of it happening again?

The ISC’s second report makes it clear the committee is far from confident that the UK and its intelligence officers will not become embroiled in human rights abuses in the future.

The committee points out the document supposed to help prevent this from happening – a paper known as consolidated guidance – contains no guidance. Rather, it appears to be more of a tool for public reassurance.

MI5, MI6 and the Ministry of Defence have been drawing upon this document more than 11 times a week in recent years as they work out whether they should proceed to feed questions to be put to a detainee at risk of being tortured or mistreated.

But when the committee asked how often these cases were escalated to government ministers – a signal that intelligence officers were concerned the detainee was about to be hurt – its members were told nobody had kept the figures.

On rendition, the committee is even more concerned. Its chairman, Dominic Grieve, said: “We find it astonishing that, given the intense focus on this 10 years ago, the government has failed to take action.

“There is no clear policy, and not even agreement, as to who has responsibility for preventing UK complicity in unlawful rendition. We are unconvinced that the government recognises the seriousness of rendition.”

There is nothing accidental about all this ambiguity, of course. It is codified. The 1988 Criminal Justice Act, which incorporated the UN convention against torture into UK law, has a get-out clause for intelligence officers who have “lawful authority” to be involved in torture.

That authority can currently be issued under the 1994 Intelligence Services Act, which can be used to “disapply” UK law in relation to any crimes committed overseas, as long as a secretary of state has signed off on this.

This does not amount to a licence to kill, or even torture, say the intelligence agency heads. Oh yes it does, say those who had a hand in drafting the law.

Over the years, when the UK and its interests have come under threat – in Cyprus, Kenya, Aden and Northern Ireland – the state has found this ambiguity extraordinarily useful.

It may be that the preservation of such legal and moral flexibility requires there to be no prosecutions. Nobody appeared in court following the torture of the so-called hooded men in Northern Ireland, for example, or after abuses at Fort Morbut in Aden.

And it appears nobody is going to be charged and prosecuted over the human rights abuses detailed in the ISC’s two reports: abuses that can be seen to have been conducted on a near-industrial scale.