CIA torture report: the British government must come clean

Just days after the publication of the US Senate’s report into CIA torture, the UK Government’s position on the part it played seems to be unravelling.

The issue has been “dealt with from the British perspective,” said David Cameron on Tuesday, after the release of details which shocked even those long-familiar with the excesses of the CIA: “rectal feeding”; the use of excessive cold leading to death; and psychological trauma so severe it lead detainees to “self-mutilat[e].” When asked on Wednesday whether the UK had requested any redactions be made to the Senate report, the response from No 10’s spokesperson was “none whatsoever, to my knowledge.”

Just a day later though, Downing St was rapidly backpedalling, confirming when asked again about requests for redactions that “there was a conversation with the agencies and their US counterparts.”

Earlier this year, Reprieve obtained an admission from then-Foreign Secretary William Hague that Britain had “made representations” regarding the potential disclosure of “UK material” by the Senate Committee conducting the torture inquiry. Subsequent Freedom of Information requests by Reprieve found that the UK Ambassador had engaged in a significant lobbying operation, meeting members of the Committee a staggering 21 times. Today, questions have been raised about Theresa May’s meeting with the Senate Committee, which also took place during its preparation of the CIA torture report.

What all this underlines is the desperate need for clarity from the British Government over the part it played in CIA torture.

Because the issue hasn’t been “dealt with.” We already know that the UK was up to its neck in the CIA rendition and torture programme. Flights used to transfer detainees to countries where they could be tortured beyond the rule of law landed on Diego Garcia, a British-owned island; MI6 worked hand-in-glove with the CIA to kidnap and “render” not only anti-Gaddafi dissidents, but also their wives and young children to the Colonel’s Libyan dungeons in 2004; and the High Court itself has ruled that the British state’s role in the case of Binyam Mohamed—who was rendered by the CIA to Morocco to face brutal torture—was “far beyond that of a bystander.”

What we don’t know is how this was allowed to happen. And that’s because our governments—of all political hues—have dragged their feet when it comes to accountability.

The Prime Minister promised an independent, judge led inquiry in July 2010. Late last year, he u-turned on that pledge, announcing that the task would instead be handed to Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC). Human rights NGOs—Reprieve included—have condemned this decision.

The ISC, it must be remembered, failed utterly as an oversight body when it came to UK involvement in CIA renditions: in 2007 it gave the UK a clean bill of health, saying there was “no evidence” of British complicity. We now know that five years before, CIA torture flights had landed on Diego Garcia; three years before, MI6 had helped render women and children; and just one year after that unfortunate ISC report, the Government itself admitted that it had been involved in renditions, after years of denial. The ISC simply lacks the powers, the independence or the ability need to get to the truth. Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg is perhaps aware of this—on Thursday, he started to part company with David Cameron, declaring that he has an “open mind… about moving to a full judicial inquiry.”

Four years on from the PM’s promise, then, and over a decade on from the abuses which occurred, we have had no accounting for the part Britain played in the CIA’s torture programme—let alone an apology for the victims it left in its wake.

We are now in the frankly embarrassing position of being behind even the US when it comes to accountability for some of the worst abuses to have taken place in the War on Terror. The public deserves to know if its government helped condemn men, women and children to the appalling abuses of the rendition programme – and the victims themselves deserve a long-overdue explanation.