US ‘demanded changes to UK torture report’
THE US government demanded last-minute changes to a sensitive report into the UK’s complicity in torture, it was claimed yesterday.
The investigation by Parliament’s secretive Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) will call for sweeping changes to how British spies operate in the field when faced with evidence of mistreatment of captives.
The report, due to be published tomorrow after an eight-year wait, is also expected to propose far greater ministerial oversight of British agents to ensure political accountability for the decisions they take.
But The Times reported that its publication had been ‘thrown into confusion’ by the US request for changes.
The ISC, a group of MPs and peers that scrutinises the work of the security services, sent two reports on the mistreatment and rendition of terror suspects after the September 11 attacks to Prime Minister Theresa May last month.
One focused on the treatment of detainees between 2001 and 2010 and the other on current issues. Rendition is where suspects are flown illegally to another country for imprisonment and interrogation.
Last night committee chairman Dominic Grieve rejected suggestions that the reports had been ‘censored’ to meet US concerns. He said: ‘The com- mittee has agreed to redact just one word in over 300 pages to meet a US security concern.
‘On Thursday I will happily point you to where those asterisks are in the report and you can see for yourself that it is not a central issue, nor a controversial issue.
‘The committee does not agree to redact material in its reports on grounds of embarrassment to anyone. So I can assure you that the US has not made wholesale redactions to the reports, as suggested.’
He also hit out at the Government over the ‘unacceptable’ leak of an upcoming report. Mr Grieve said: ‘The draft reports should have been kept on an exceptionally tight distribution within Government. It appears that procedure has been abused in order to leak details of the reports, so as to draw the sting on Thursday.’
David Cameron originally supported a judge-led inquiry allegations of Britain’s complicity in torture and appointed Sir Peter Gibson to take charge in 2010.
Sir Peter found that British spies were told by intelligence chiefs they did not need to intervene if terrorism suspects were being tortured by US agents.
But amid huge controversy, the inquiry was scrapped in 2012 before completion.
The second of the ISC’s two reports is expected to be highly critical of Whitehall and a refusal to allow the ISC to speak to the agents actually involved.
It is expected to criticise the fact that only the highest ranking members of the intelligence services were given permission to talk, rather than those on the front line. That caused a major falling out, and much of the delay in publishing the report, as the committee pressed for greater transparency.
Last month Britain endured a day of shame after being forced into an unprecedented admission that it was involved in the torture and kidnap of a Libyan dissident. Ministers apologised after accepting that Tony Blair’s Labour government and MI6 sent Abdul Hakim Belhadj back into the murderous clutches of Colonel Gaddafi in 2004.
‘Thrown into confusion’