US Senate Committee Agreed to Conceal UK Complicity in CIA Torture

Britain’s collusion in the torture of individuals who were illegally seized by US authorities is now established.

The 500-page report, itself a heavily-redacted summary from a 6,000 page still-classified document, reveals the CIA operated a brutal and systematic program of torture and abuse.

For decades, successive British governments have slavishly supported every war, including the illegal invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, out of which the CIA’s torture regime emerged. Yet the Senate’s summary contains not a single reference to the UK intelligence agencies, despite citing cases in which they were intimately involved.

The government of Prime Minister David Cameron had previously maintained that it did not ask the Senate Intelligence Committee to make any redactions to the report.

Downing Street was still maintaining this lie on Wednesday, the day the report was published. Asked by reporters if any redactions had been sought, Cameron’s spokesman said there had been “none whatsoever, to my knowledge.”

On Thursday, Cameron’s deputy official spokesman said, “My understanding is that no redactions were sought to remove any suggestion that there was UK involvement in any alleged torture or rendition. But I think there was a conversation with the agencies and their US counterparts on the executive summary. Any redactions sought there would have been on national security grounds in the way we might have done with any other report.”

On Friday, it was revealed that Home Secretary Theresa May, among other senior UK government officials, met members of the US Senate committee working on the CIA report, according to the World Socialist Web Site.

Another who met the committee was Lord West, who previously held the post of chief of defense intelligence and from 2007-10 was Chairman of National Security Forum in the last Labor government.

On Friday, opposing calls for a public inquiry into British complicity in torture, West told the BBC, “(I)’m sure there may be the odd case where an agent was aware what the Americans were doing, but that has now been sealed off because they are very clear now what the position is.”

He later told Sky that an inquiry would be “a waste of time”, adding, “What are we trying to prove? The only thing one might find is 10, 15 years ago maybe an agent or maybe two agents were aware waterboarding was going on, indeed may even have been in the same building.”

Such claims have no credibility whatsoever.

Among several cases relating to British intelligence agency operations mentioned in the report is that of Binyam Mohamed, a British citizen who was tortured and then sent to Guantanamo Bay under the US’s illegal “extraordinary rendition”—kidnappings and torture program. In 2010, the British Court of Appeal agreed to release an earlier ruling, in the face of fierce opposition from the Labor government, that the UK intelligence body MI5 had colluded with US authorities in Mohamed’s torture.

The Mohamed case revealed the extent of British intelligence collusion with its US counterparts, with the UK government insisting that disclosure in court of MI5 and MI6 cooperation with the US authorities would prevent the CIA from sharing intelligence information with Britain in future.

Conservative MP David Davis, who poses as a defender of civil liberties, said, “Downing Street’s U-turn on its previous denial that redactions had taken place tell us what we already know—that there was complicity, and that it wasn’t reflected in the Senate report.”

Addressing Mohamed’s case, Davis said, “We know from the behavior of the previous government with respect to the Binyam Mohamed case that the term national security includes national embarrassment.”