Document: The SC Report on the C.I.A's Use of Torture

Britain convulsed by its dirty secret in wake of CIA torture report

Britain convulsed by its dirty secret in wake of CIA torture report
Senate report on rendition contrasts with recalcitrant UK, whose judge-led inquiry was shut down by Cameron

The Guardian, Friday 12 December 2014 19.25 GMT

This week’s report laid bare the way in which the CIA had been responsible for the mistreatment of its detainees. Photograph: Charles Ommanney/Getty Images North America
In September 2005, on the day the Guardian published its first edition in the new Berliner format, the newspaper informed its readers that a fleet of CIA aircraft had been using the UK’s airports during the agency’s so-called extraordinary rendition operations.

Aircraft from the 26-strong fleet had flown into and out of the UK at least 210 times since 9/11, the newspaper reported, “an average of one flight a week”, refuelling at RAF bases and civilian airports that included Northolt, Heathrow, Birmingham, Bournemouth, Belfast and – the agency’s favourite destination – Prestwick.

“It is not a matter for the MoD,” one Ministry of Defence official told the newspaper. “The aircraft use our airfields. We don’t ask any questions.”

Since then, a handful of British parliamentarians, judges, human rights activists and journalists have dragged into the public domain one piece of damning evidence after another to construct an incomplete but nonetheless disturbing picture of the UK’s involvement in the global kidnap and torture programme that was launched immediately after 9/11.

There was the disclosure of government memos that showed:

• Jack Straw consigned British terrorism suspects to Guantánamo Bay, and that these men were flown there after Tony Blair had learned the Americans were torturing their prisoners.

• The revelation that at least two victims of the rendition programme were flown in and out of Diego Garcia, the British Indian Ocean territory.

• The admission that MI5 interrogated a British resident, Binyam Mohamed, after the CIA had provided a graphic description of the way he was being tortured.

• The discovery that MI5 and MI6 officers operated under secret orders to weigh the importance of the information they hoped to gain from a particular prisoner against the amount of pain that person would likely suffer as it was being extracted.

• The episode in which one British jihadi’s fingernails were ripped out after MI6 suggested that a notorious Pakistani intelligence agency detain him, and MI5 and Greater Manchester police drew up questions to be put to him.

Finally, there was the discovery, amid the chaos and debris of the Libyan revolution, of a cache of secret correspondence from MI6 which detailed the rendition operations that the agency had been mounting in partnership with the CIA and the Gaddafi and Mubarak regimes. How many such operations were conducted is unclear, although it is known that two Libyan families, including a six-year-old girl and a pregnant woman, were kidnapped and flown to one of Gaddafi’s prisons.

There have been disclosures about these matters in the media and courts, but no effective official investigation has been allowed to run its course in the UK.

In the United States, the Senate intelligence committee this week published a report that laid bare, in excoriating detail, the way in which the CIA had been responsible for the appalling mistreatment of its detainees, and had then lied about the efficacy of its torture techniques.

Sweden’s parliamentary ombudsman has investigated the country’s involvement in the rendition of two men to Egypt and awarded them around $500,000 each in compensation. In Italy, 26 CIA officers and pilots have been convicted in absentia for their role in the kidnap of a Muslim cleric who was flown from Milan to Cairo to be questioned under torture.

In the UK, there has been no such reckoning. The last government resorted to blanket denials for years, and in 2007 the intelligence and security committee (ISC), the panel of MPs and peers that is supposed to provide democratic oversight of the agencies, conducted what it described as an investigation, before concluding that MI5 and MI6 had been guilty only of being “slow to detect the emerging pattern of renditions” by the US. In fact, five days after 9/11, the head of counter-terrorism at MI6, Sir Mark Allen, had received a three-hour briefing from the CIA on its planned rendition programme.

There have also been six separate police investigations: four concluded there was insufficient evidence to proceed further, while two, by Police Scotland and Scotland Yard, have dragged on for years. Within weeks of the coalition being formed, David Cameron promised a judge-led inquiry. “I do not think for a moment that we should believe that the ISC should be doing this piece of work. For public confidence, and for independence from parliament, party and government, it is right to have a judge-led inquiry,” he told MPs.

The inquiry began its work, but 12 months ago the government shut it down, much to the frustration of Sir Peter Gibson, the judge appointed to lead it. The reason given publicly for scrapping an inquiry that the prime minister had said was needed to restore the UK’s “reputation as a country that believes in human rights, justice, fairness and the rule of law”, was that Gibson could not examine the Libyan renditions once the police also began investigating them. There was also a behind-the-scenes dispute over the question of who should decide which of the agencies’ secret documents should be made public: the judge, or the agencies themselves.

Gibson told journalists he had seen evidence of UK involvement in rendition, and published an interim report, identifying 27 issues which he believed needed further investigation. However, the government decided that those issues would be investigated by the ISC.

The current ISC chair, Sir Malcolm Rifkind, appears determined the committee will be more rigorous and show greater independence of government, than it has in the past. However, its rendition inquiries will not be completed before next May’s election after which it is unclear who will chair the ISC.

Meanwhile, the committee maintains that it cannot examine the Libyan renditions while a police inquiry is said to be in progress. And once the inquiries it does make are complete, Downing Street will decide how much of its report will be made public or remain secret; a decision that will be taken following consultation with the agencies.

Victims of torture and rendition continue to look to the courts for some acknowledgment that their stories are true, and that what happened was wrong. Government lawyers fight all the way. When one Libyan rendition victim, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, brought proceedings against Straw, the then foreign secretary, and against Allen and MI6, lawyers argued the court should throw out the case because it might damage the UK’s relationship with the US.

When cases against the government do proceed, the most damning evidence may be heard in camera – with even the claimants and their lawyers excluded – under the secret court provisions of the Justice and Security Act, seen by some as the British state’s only effective response to date to the mounting evidence of its involvement in serious human rights abuses.

On Tuesday, after the publication of the Senate committee’s report, Cameron told a news conference in Ankara that he deplored torture, but that “in Britain we have had the Gibson inquiry” – not mentioning that he had shut it down – and that because the ISC was now on the case he was “satisfied that our system is dealing with all of these issues”.

Next day, with the report’s shocking details filling the media, lawyers for a taxi driver from Luton, north of London, who was detained in Pakistan at the behest of the CIA and MI5 and allegedly tortured, were at the high court in London, bringing a damages claim on his behalf. Twenty minutes into the two-day hearing the court was cleared of press and public. Any journalist who tried to disclose what was being said behind closed doors, and what it showed about MI5’s involvement with the taxi driver’s ordeal, would be committing an offence under the Contempt of Court Act, and could face prosecution and imprisonment.

At the exact moment the journalists were ordered out of court, Labour party officials at Westminster were briefing colleagues that Harriet Harman, the shadow deputy prime minister, was not minded to raise the matters dominating the news when she faced Nick Clegg at PMQs later that day. This is hardly surprising, as Clegg would have pointed out she had been a senior member of government at the time the abuses were happening.

And this may help explain the UK’s continuing failure to come fully and honestly to terms with the past, and why the British system of oversight appears to be so anaemic, when compared with the manner in which its senior coalition partner has so painfully exposed its own crimes: there is no evidence that either MI5 or MI6 became involved in kidnap and torture without the full authorisation of government ministers, people for whom there would be legal as well as political consequences, were the truth to be told.

“Globalizing Torture” – More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture

“Globalizing Torture” – More Than 50 Countries Helped the CIA Outsource Torture

6 FEB
By Spencer Ackerman

February 06, 2013 “Wired” – – In the years after 9/11, the CIA ran a worldwide program to hold and interrogate suspected members of al-Qaida, sometimes brutally. It wasn’t alone: The agency had literally dozens of partners that helped in ways large and small. Only it’s never been clear just how many nations enabled CIA capture and torture; cooperated with it; or carried it out on behalf of the U.S. — until now.

A new report from the Open Society Foundation details the CIA’s effort to outsource torture since 9/11 in excruciating detail. Known as “extraordinary rendition,” the practice concerns taking detainees to and from U.S. custody without a legal process — think of it like an off-the-books extradition — and often entailed handing detainees over to countries that practiced torture. The Open Society Foundation found that 136 people went through the post-9/11 extraordinary rendition, and 54 countries were complicit in it.

Some were official U.S. adversaries, like Iran and Syria, brought together with the CIA by the shared interest of combating terrorism. “By engaging in torture and other abuses associated with secret detention and extraordinary rendition,” writes chief Open Society Foundation investigator Amrit Singh in a report released early Tuesday, “the U.S. government violated domestic and international law, thereby diminishing its moral standing and eroding support for its counterterrorism efforts worldwide as these abuses came to light.”

Iran didn’t do any torturing on behalf of the CIA. Instead, it quietly transferred at least 15 of its own detainees to Afghan custody in March 2002. Six of those found their way into the CIA’s secret prisons. “Because the hand-over happened soon after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan,” Singh writes, “Iran was aware that the United States would have effective control over any detainees handed over to Afghan authorities.” At least one of those detainees, Tawfik al-Bihani, ended up at Guantanamo Bay, where his official file makes no mention of his time with the CIA.

Iran’s proxy Syria did torture on behalf of the United States. The most famous case involves Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen snatched in 2002 by the U.S. at John F. Kennedy International Airport before the CIA sent him to Syria under the mistaken impression he was a terrorist. In Syrian custody, Arar was “imprisoned for more than ten months in a tiny grave-like cell, beaten with cables, and threatened with electric shocks by the Syrian government,” Singh writes.

But it wasn’t just Arar. At least seven others were rendered to Syria. Among their destinations: a prison in west Damascus called the Palestine Branch, which features an area called “the Grave,” comprised of “individual cells that were roughly the size of coffins.” Syrian intelligence reportedly uses something called a “German Chair” to “stretch the spine.” These days the Obama administration prefers to call for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, the murderer of over 60,000 Syrians, to step down.

Many, many other countries were complicit in the renditions. For a month, Zimbabwe hosted five CIA detainees seized from Malawi in June 2003 before they were released in Sudan. Turkey, a NATO ally, allowed a plane operated by Richmor Aviation, which has been linked to CIA renditions, to refuel in Adana in 2002 and gave an Iraqi terrorist suspect to the CIA in 2006. Lots of countries played host to CIA rendition flights, including Sri Lanka, Thailand, Afghanistan, Belgium and Azerbaijan. Italy let the plane carrying Arar refuel. Under Muammar Gadhafi, Libya was an eager participant in the CIA’s rendition scheme — and the Open Society Foundation sifted through documents found after Gadhafi fell to discover that Hong Kong helped shuttle a detainee named Abu Munthir to the Libyan regime.

The full 54 countries that aided in post-9/11 renditions:

Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen, and Zimbabwe.

 The Open Society Foundation doesn’t rule out additional ones being involved that it has yet to discover.

Singh and the Open Society Foundation don’t presume that the CIA is out of the extraordinary renditions game under Obama. Danger Room pal Jeremy Scahill recently toured a prison in Somalia that the CIA uses. While Obama issued an executive order in 2009 to get the CIA out of the detentions business, the order “did not apply to facilities used for short term, transitory detention.” The Obama administration says it won’t transfer detainees to countries without a pledge from a host government not to torture them — but Syria’s Assad made exactly that pledge to the U.S. before torturing Maher Arar.

Much of this is likely to be contained in the Senate intelligence committee’s recent report into CIA torture. It’s unclear when, if ever, that report will be declassified. But the Open Society Foundation’s study into renditions comes right as Obama aide John Brennan — already under pressure to clarify his role, if any, in post-9/11 torture — is about to testify to the panel ahead of becoming CIA director. It remains to be seen if the Senate committee will ask Brennan to clarify if the CIA still practices extraordinary rendition, along with its old friends.

Wired.com © 2013 Condé Nast.

Image embedded in this article by ICH, did not appear in the original item. 

References to Britain’s intelligence agencies were deleted

 References to Britain’s intelligence agencies were deleted at their request from the damning US report on the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11, it has emerged.

Rowena Mason and Ian Cobain
The Guardian, Friday 12 December 2014


A spokesman for David Cameron acknowledged the UK had been granted deletions in advance of the publication, contrasting with earlier assertions by No 10. Downing Street said any redactions were only requested on “national security” grounds and contained nothing to suggest UK agencies had participated in torture or rendition.

However, the admission will fuel suspicions that the report – while heavily critical of the CIA – was effectively sanitised to conceal the way in which close allies of the US became involved in the global kidnap and torture programme that was mounted after the al-Qaida attacks.

On Wednesday, the day the report was published, asked whether redactions had been sought, Cameron’s official spokesman told reporters there had been “none whatsoever, to my knowledge”.

However, on Thursday, the prime minister’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.”

The two main cases relevant to the involvement of Britain’s spying agencies related to Binyam Mohamed, a UK citizen tortured and secretly flown to Guantánamo Bay, and the abduction of Abdel Hakim Belhaj and Sami-al-Saadi, two prominent Libyan dissidents, and their families, who were flown to Tripoli in 2004 where they were tortured by Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police.

There is no reference at all in the Senate’s 500-page summary report to UK intelligence agencies or the British territory of Diego Garcia used by the US as a military base. But the executive summary contained heavy redactions throughout, prompting speculation that references to US allies has been erased.

In the wake of the Senate report, the UK government is coming under increasing pressure to order a more transparent inquiry into the actions of MI5 and MI6 amid claims of British complicity in the US torture programme.

Asked about the need for a full public inquiry, Nick Clegg, the deputy prime minister, conceded yesterday that he was open to the idea if an outstanding investigation by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee, which meets weekly in secret, leaves remaining questions unanswered. No 10 also suggested Cameron had not ruled this out if the ISC does not settle the torture issue.

The government had initially commissioned an inquiry by retired judge Sir Peter Gibson to look at the UK’s treatment of detainees after 9/11. However, he only managed a preliminary report raising 27 serious questions about the behaviour of the UK security services, before it was replaced by an investigation handled by the ISC in December last year.

The ISC’s report on the UK’s involvement in rendition after 9/11 will not, however, be completed before next year’s election, so it is unclear how many members of the nine-strong panel of MPs and peers will still be in parliament to complete the work.

The current chair, former foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind, said that the ISC’s previous examination of the UK’s involvement in rendition in 2007, which absolved the agencies, had “quite rightly been severely criticised, because the committee at the time wasn’t given by MI6 all the material in their files”.

Rifkind said he was confident that that would not happen again. Yet the current ISC investigation will not examine the two key cases of the Libyan dissidents being kidnapped and delivered to the Gaddafi regime because they are the subject of a police inquiry.

MPs from all three main parties said the UK agencies’ requests for deletions from the US underlined the need for a more transparent public inquiry than the one being conducted by the ISC, which hands its reports to Downing Street for pre-approval.

David Davis, the Tory MP and former shadow home secretary, 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. “We know from the behaviour of the previous government with respect to the Binyam Mohamed case, that the term national security includes national embarrassment.”

Sarah Teather, the Lib Dem former children’s minister, also added: “It’s not good enough to kick it into the future and hope a future government will pick it up. We’ve had all sorts of semi-inquiries. Watching what’s happened in the last couple of days, as comments flip around, that’s the experience of campaigners who’ve been trying to get justice on behalf of people who have accused the British intelligence services of acting in this way.”

Diane Abbott, the Labour MP, said that “as a first step we need to know what was removed from the reports” and secondly more must be revealed about what UK government ministers knew at the time.

The US is at least trying to be honest about what went on,” she said. “To their shame, the UK authorities are still trying to hide their complicity in torture. We need to know how much ministers knew. And if they didn’t know why not?”

Earlier Abbott, who ran for the Labour leadership against both Miliband brothers, said ex-foreign secretary David Miliband needed to be “completely transparent” about his involvement in the era.

But Ed Miliband came to his brother’s strong defence as he was asked yesterday whether the former cabinet minister had “questions to answer”.
US hid UK links in CIA torture report at request of British spy agencies
Downing Street says UK intelligence asked for redactions to be made in Senate report on the grounds of national security

“He’s talked about these things in the past,” the Labour leader said. “I know how seriously he took these things in government. I know he answered questions about this in the House of Commons while he was in government. He is never someone who would ever countenance the British state getting involved in this sort of activity.”

Pressed on whether Tony Blair had questions to answer, Ed Miliband said: “Anyone who has read this report will be deeply troubled. I’m not going to speak for that report.

“The government has previously announced an inquiry into these issues, and then held off on the inquiry because there are court cases going on. It’s right to let those court cases take their course here.”