“After careful consideration” is a bureaucratic phrase that signals elegantly, concisely, that you, reader, are about to be stitched up. In that inimitable British way, it confirms that you are about to be given a “decision” that was a foregone conclusion, justified with the greatest haste, sloppiness and unfairness.

So it was on Friday, when the Crown Prosecution Service let slip that “after careful consideration” it had concluded its victims’ right of review into Operation Lydd, the police probe of UK involvement in the kidnap and rendition of two Libyan families to Gaddafi’s torture chambers. The CPS decided to uphold its decision that no one in the British government would be brought to justice. It called my office (the victims’ representatives) at end of business on a Thursday, in a patent effort to bury the decision and ensure the public would take no notice.

It was a land-speed record for the CPS, after the original team sat on the matter for two years before charging nobody. The “review” team had the case for just over 50 days. With a police file of over 28,000 pages, they would have had to read 550 pages daily, seven days a week, just to process all the evidence. There is no real prospect that they even read the police file. This is the “careful and fully independent consideration” the Libyan renditions victims are thought to be worth.

I will never forget the day I met Arwa al-Saadi. With the apparent connivance of MI6, this little girl was bundled onto a plane with her father, mother and three siblings at the tender age of six. We sat on the sofa and thumbed through her pink sketchbook; it was a disturbing mix of manga figures out of her favourite cartoons, and scenes from her life’s worst moments. One of them showed her and her family in a tiny raft fleeing Gaddafi’s Libya by night. She saw horrors that no adult deserves to see. She and her family have been waiting for justice for half a decade.

Not only does the CPS refuse to hear from Arwa al-Saadi: it doesn’t want to hear from other rendition victims either

Yet, the position of the CPS is that neither she nor any of the victims have the slightest role to play in the right for review. Not only does the CPS refuse to hear from Arwa, it doesn’t want to hear from other rendition victims either, such as Abdul-Hakim Belhaj, the Libyan dissident who put grievance aside and fought with Nato to overthrow Gaddafi, and has said he would walk away from the case for a mere apology. It doesn’t want to hear from Fatima Boudchar either, who was five months’ pregnant at the time of her abduction. In effect, victims have no role or rights; while prosecutors carry out a quick box-tick review.

It is not the first sign that things were amiss at the CPS. During the police investigation we asked prosecutors to meet the families. They rebuffed them. (They offered, and retracted, a meeting when the original decision not to charge former MI6 counter-terrorism chief Sir Mark Allen was published.) In a typical dose of cultural incompetence, the decision letter did not even get the victims’ names right: it mistakenly referred to Arwa’s dad, Sami, as Khadija – the name of Arwa’s older sister and only, ever, a woman’s name.

It is difficult to escape the conclusion that the single guiding principle at the CPS is to act exactly as those at the top of government would wish. During the investigation and afterwards, I spoke to former senior prosecutors and others for advice. All of them were clear: members of the security services are basically never put on trial in this country and, however shocking this case, they probably never will be. The CPS would always, always close ranks and defend MI6 officers, looking for any excuse, however flimsy, not to bring a single official to book.

George Orwell was right when he said: “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.” This is how a 28,000-page evidence file from the police transmogrified into “insufficient evidence”. How a brisk rubber-stamp by an underling of the chief prosecutor’s decision morphs into “careful consideration”. And how the CPS can call something that, in the end, never had anything to do with Arwa or any other victim at all a “victim’s right of review”.

The director of public prosecutions, Alison Saunders, took office saying that vulnerable victims got a “raw deal” out of the British justice system. She was right. And perhaps she genuinely meant her pledge to do better. Maybe when she said it, without any tough decisions before her, it was not just another load of bureaucratic verbiage. If she genuinely wants to solve this problem at the CPS, she might start by taking a hard look in the mirror.