by Ian Cobain
The Guardian

Although government promised as much as possible would be made public, no date has yet been fixed for publication.

An official report into Britain’s involvement in rendition and torture since the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the US has yet to be published more than nine months after it was completed and delivered to David Cameron.

The report was written by Sir Peter Gibson, a retired judge, after he spent a year examining secret government documents in preparation for an inquiry the prime minister ordered shortly after entering Downing Street. The inquiry was eventually shelved shortly after police announced they were embarking on a criminal investigation, but Gibson, who served as the intelligence services commissioner until January 2011, agreed to write an interim report on his findings.

Although the government promised that “as much of this report as possible will be made public”, the Cabinet Office says no date has yet been fixed for publication. Asked why publication had been delayed, a spokesperson replied: “I can’t comment.”

The United Nations special rapporteur on counter-terrorism and human rights, Ben Emmerson, has called on the government to publish the report as part of what he describes as “a reckoning with the past”.

Emmerson also called on the US government to publish a report on rendition approved last year by the Senate intelligence committee, and which, according to the committee’s Democrat majority, shows the so-called rendition and enhanced interrogation programme to have been a “terrible mistake”.

Failure to publish the two reports, Emmerson said last month, suggested “a policy of de facto immunity for public officials who engaged in acts of torture, rendition and secret detention, and their superiors and political masters who authorised these acts”.

The British government says the Gibson inquiry was shelved in January last year because Scotland Yard had embarked upon investigations into the UK-Libyan rendition operations that came to light following the discovery of a cache of secret intelligence documents in an abandoned office building in Libya’s capital, Tripoli, following the collapse of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.

READ MORE HERE: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/apr/04/rendition-report-unpublished

The report has yet to be published more than nine months after it was completed and delivered to David Cameron. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA