British Prime Minister David Cameron's office has admitted asking the US government to remove references to the part played by British intelligence service in the CIA kidnap and torture programmes revealed this week in a US Senate report.
The heavily redacted report from the US Senate Committee on Intelligence, released on Tuesday, outlined a programme of systematic torture, including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and physical threats. Many of these took place in 'black sites' on foreign territory, often following the 'extraordinary rendition' of alleged terrorism suspects, following the 9/11 attacks.
The admission by Downing Street that it asked for its role in the CIA programme to be redacted from the final report will fuel calls for another investigation into the role Britain played in it. Cameron's DEPUTY Spokesman Said: "I think there WAS A conversation with the Agencies and Their US Counterparts on the Executive summary. Any redactions most sought Would there have Been on National Security grounds".
British intelligence services MI5 and MI6 have long being suspected of colluding with their CIA colleagues to supply information and attend some of the torture sessions. Britain is also alleged to have allowed its airspace, airports and foreign military sites to have been used for extraordinary rendition flights.
British Tip-offs and Touch-downs
In 2002, Foreign Secretary David Miliband was forced to admit to parliament that two US rendition flights had landed on Diego Garcia, a US base on British Indian Ocean Territory in 2002. There are allegations that other rendition flights landed in UK airports — at least for re-fuelling — in the years after 9/11.
Central to the accusations of British intelligence services involvement in the torture programme is Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian national and United Kingdom resident, who was detained as a suspected enemy combatant by the US Government in Guantanamo Bay prison between 2004 and 2009 without charges. He was arrested in Pakistan and transported first to Morocco under the US extraordinary rendition programme, where he claimed to have been interrogated under torture.
Having had the US charges against him dropped, he returned to the UK and took legal action against the British Government in 2009 for collusion by MI5 and MI6 in his torture by the United States. In February 2010, the UK Court of Appeal ruled That he HAD Been subjected to " Cruel, Inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States Authorities " in Which the British Intelligence Services HAD Been complicit. The government awarded him £ 1 million compensation in settlement in 2011.
Another case concerned the abduction and torture in Libya of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami-al-Saadi. In 2013, the UK government paid £ 2.3 million in compensation to Sami al-Saadi following allegations of UK complicity in his rendition to Libya in 2004 and subsequent torture at the hands of Gaddafi's regime.
Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the leader of the conservative Islamist al-Watan Part, was arrested in Pakistan in late 2001 and handed over to US security officials. According to sources, he was tracked by the CIA after a tip-off from MI6 and arrested in 2004 at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia. He was detained at the airport before being put on an extraordinary rendition flight to Libya where he was held and allegedly tortured at the Abu Salim prison for seven years.
EIT My Words
Meanwhile, CIA Director John Brennan, has provoked outrage by refusing to accept the central criticism of the US Senate report, that it used unacceptable methods of torture on suspects. Instead he chose to call them 'enhanced interrogation techniques'.
He admitted that some agency officers used "abhorrent" methods on detainees captured following the 9/11 attacks but said it was "unknowable" whether harsh interrogation techniques yielded useful intelligence.
Brennan rejected the report's conclusion that the agency had deceived the White House, Congress and the public about its interrogation program.
"Our Reviews Indicate That the Detention and Interrogation Programme Produced Useful Intelligence That Helped the United States thwart Plans Attack, Capture Terrorists and save Lives, "Brennan news Told A Conference at the Agency's headquarters Virginia.
"But Let me be clear. We have not concluded it WAS That the use of EITS (enhanced Interrogation techniques) Within That Program That allowed us to Obtain Useful information from detainees subjected to Them," Said Brennan.
"The Cause-and-effect relationship Between the use of EITS Useful information and subsequently Provided by the detainee is, in my View, unknowable," he Added.
Whatever Brennan chooses to calls them — enhanced interrogation techniques, or just plain torture — the fact that Britain has admitted asking for references to its involvement to be removed from the damning report out this week shows it has something to hide.
