LONDON: A powerful British parliamentary committee will ask the United States to hand over blacked out parts of a report into the CIA, to try to establish whether British spies were complicit in torture or rendition, its chairman said yesterday.
If parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) saw evidence of such behaviour, it could summon politicians from the left-leaning Labour party such as former prime minister Tony Blair who were in power at the time of the allegations.
“If British intelligence officials were present when people were being tortured then they were complicit in that torture,” Sir Malcolm Rifkind, the ISC’s chair and a former foreign secretary, said. “That would be quite against all the standards of this country. It would be something that ought to be brought into the public domain,” Rifkind told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show. A report by the US Senate Intelligence Committee released last week found that the CIA had misled the White House and the public about its torture of detainees after the September 11 attacks and had acted more brutally than thought.
The British government said it had asked the United States to keep parts of the report referring to UK intelligence activity secret on national security grounds. Britain’s foreign and domestic security services, known as MI6 and MI5, have for years been accused of colluding in the ill-treatment of suspected militants. Reuters
