Intelligence committee requests CIA material on UK role in probe

Britain’s top security committee will ask CIA to hand over all material documenting UK’s role in the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation programme.

The House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee has launched an inquiry into the treatment of detainees by British intelligence agencies in the decade following 9/11.

Britain has strongly condemned the CIA’s use of brutality and deception to interrogate “terror suspects” post-9/11 attacks as made public by a Senate Intelligence Committee report.

British prime minister David Cameron reacted strongly against the report in which committee chair Dianne Feinstein said the techniques used by the CIA were “far more brutal than people were led to believe”.

Britain also expressed concern over the harsh CIA interrogation tactics which included threats and torture as detainees were forced to stay awake for over a week at a time, while several detainees suffered from “hallucinations, paranoia, insomnia and attempts at self-harm and self-mutilation”.

Sir Malcolm Rifkind, who heads the intelligence committee confirmed that it would ask the US government if it could see the redacted material.

According to Sir Malcolm, if British intelligence officials were present when people were being tortured, then they were complicit in that torture.“That would be quite against all the standards of this country, it would be something that ought to be brought into the public domain,” Sir Malcolm added.

Downing Street however has admitted that some parts of the report have been omitted from public domain by British intelligence agencies on by request to the CIA due to reasons of national security on intelligence operations.

Cameron meanwhile said “Let’s be clear: torture is wrong. Torture is always wrong. Those of us who want to see a safer, more secure world, who want to see this extremism defeated, we won’t succeed if we lose our moral authority, if we lose the things that make our systems work and our countries successful. So we should be very clear about that”.Cameron added “Now, obviously after 9/11 there were things that happened that were wrong, and we should be clear about the fact that they were wrong. In Britain we have had the Gibson Inquiry, and that inquiry has now produced a series of questions that the Intelligence and Security Committee will  look at.