U.K. wants to see more of torture report

LONDON — A U.K. parliamentary panel wants access to information not made public in a U.S. Senate report that may pertain to Britain’s role in the interrogation and rendition of terror suspects following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Malcolm Rifkind, chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, told the BBC on Sunday that the panel investigating allegations of British involvement in torture would request access to the Senate’s findings related to Britain.

Prime Minister David Cameron’s office has acknowledged some parts of the report were blacked out for security reasons, but says none of it related to any alleged involvement in “activity that would be unlawful in the U.K.”

The request for material to be omitted from the executive summary published last week was made by British intelligence agencies to the CIA, rather than the government.

The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on CIA interrogations exposed years of misrepresentations that seem designed to boost the case for the effectiveness of brutal interrogations.

The CIA report has led to demands that Britain halt negotiations with the U.S. over the use of Diego Garcia, a British atoll in the Indian Ocean where the Americans have a military base. Britain has acknowledged Diego Garcia was used by the U.S. as a refuelling stop during the 2002 secret transfers of two terrorism suspects.

The 50-year agreement allowing the Americans to use the island runs out in 2016.

Former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney told NBC’s Meet the Press Sunday that thenpresident George W. Bush was fully briefed on interrogation tactics used by the CIA — including waterboarding, sleep deprivation and rectal feeding — disputing a conclusion reached in the report, which said Bush wasn’t briefed on specific techniques until April 2006 — four years after the program had begun.

“The notion that we were not notified at the White House about what was going on is not true,” Cheney said. “This man knew what we were doing,” he said of Bush. “He authorized it. He approved it. A statement by the Senate Democrats ... that the president didn’t know what was going on is just a flat-out lie.”