After torture report, senators request review

WASHINGTON — Two senior U.S. senators are asking Defense Secretary Jim Mattis to investigate reports that U.S. military interrogators worked with forces from the United Arab Emirates accused of torturing detainees in Yemen.

Sen. John McCain, the Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and the ranking Democrat, Jack Reed, called the reports “deeply disturbing.”

The reports were revealed in an investigation by The Associated Press published Thursday.

That same day, McCain and Reed wrote a letter to the defense secretary asking him to conduct an immediate review of the reported abuse and what U.S. forces knew.

“Even the suggestion that the United States tolerates torture by our foreign partners compromises our national security mission by undermining the moral principles that distinguishes us from our enemies— our belief that all people possess basic human rights,” the senators wrote Mattis. “We are confident that you find these allegations as extremely troubling as we do.”

The AP’s report detailed a network of secret prisons across southern Yemen where hundreds are detained in the hunt for al-Qaida militants and held without charges. American defense officials confirmed to the AP that U.S. forces have interrogated some detainees in Yemen but denied any participation in, or knowledge of, human rights abuses.

Defense officials told the AP that the department had looked into reports of torture and concluded that its personnel were not involved. The American officials confirmed that the U.S. provides questions to the Emiratis and receives transcripts of their interrogations.

The 18 lock-ups are run by the UAE and by Yemeni forces it created, according to accounts from former detainees, families of prisoners, civil rights lawyers and Yemeni military officials.