TORTURE PROBE
U. K. reacts to CIA report
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 that some parts of the report were blacked out for national security reasons, but says none of it related to any alleged British involvement that in “activity that would be unlawful in the U. K.” The requests for the ma- terial 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.
When asked whether he was hopeful he’d get the information, Rifkind replied, “I do not say I would be confident.”
The CIA report has led to demands that Britain halt negotiations with the United States over the use of Diego Garcia, a British atoll in the Indian Ocean where the Americans have a military base. Britain has previously acknowledged that Diego Garcia was twice 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.
In an interview Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press program, former U. S. vice- president Dick Cheney said president George W. Bush was fully briefed on interrogation tactics used by the CIA, disputing a conclusion reached in last week’s report.
The report by Democratic members of the Senate intelligence committee said Bush wasn’t briefed on specific CIA 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,” Cheney said of Bush. “He authorized it. He approved it. A statement by the Senate Democrats for partisan purposes that the president didn’t know what was going on is just a flat- out lie.”
The report concluded that techniques, such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and rectal feeding, were largely ineffective at obtaining useful information.