Sir Malcolm Rifkind to ask for details of UK references in CIA torture report
Sir Malcolm Rifkind has vowed to investigate allegations of UK complicity in the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation programme.
The House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee said the group will ask the US to hand over material from the US Senate report which detailed “brutal” treatment of al-Qaeda suspects in the wake of 9/11.
Downing Street said that certain material was omitted at the government’s request for national security reasons.
However, Rifkind insisted that the committee would seek access to an unredacted version of the report and would make public any findings that did not threaten national security.
Speaking on the Andrew Marr show, the former foreign secretary said:
We cannot instruct the United States’ government – but we are going to request them, not to see the whole redacted stuff because a lot of it’s got nothing to do with the United Kingdom, but any references there may be to the United Kingdom and the United Kingdom’s possible involvement in these matters. If that was redacted in the public report … yes, we want to see that.In the United Kingdom, anything can only be redacted on National Security grounds and if the Prime Minister tried to redact one of our reports simply to prevent political embarrassment, we would refuse. And we would make a huge public fuss about it.
Last week a 480 page summary of a 6,000 page report by the US senate committee into CIA treatment of terror suspects denounced the agency’s methods as an ineffective means of gathering intelligence and revealed the agency had hidden the nature of their techniques to US policy makers.
Documents released by the government suggest that since 2009 home secretary Theresa May and other officials may have met the US committee that published report a number of times before it was published.
Shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper, also speaking on the Andrew Marr show, said she supported the Intelligence and Security committee’s inquiry.
She said:
That has always been our assumption that that would be the way to do it and the Government had said that they would do that when they set up the Gibson inquiry. I think that was a good thing to do.