Reports Detail UK Tolerance for Post-9/11 Torture
(Sputnik) – The cross-party Intelligence and Security Committee of the British House of Commons has issued two reports conceding that the country’s intelligence agencies were complicit in the abduction, detention and torture of terrorism suspects to far greater degree than has previously been known. The reports dealt with the decade following the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.
Panel members led by former Conservative attorney general Dominic Grieve pored over more than 40,000 declassified documents and received the testimony of both former detainees and employees of MI5 in the course of its investigation. In a press release accompanying the reports’ publication, the committee members claimed that some avenues of investigation had been blocked to them by the government.
“In terms of mistreatment, we have not found any evidence that UK Agency officers or Defence Intelligence personnel directly carried out physical mistreatment of detainees. We have found evidence of UK officers making verbal threats in nine cases. We have also found two cases in which UK personnel were party to mistreatment administered by others,” the Committee said in its release.
By Carlos Latuff – , Attribution, Wikimedia Commons
As a result of the findings, the Committee has recommended that a previous Metropolitan Police investigation into abuse by the Secret Services should be reopened.
In the years following the 9/11 attacks, the British played a crucial secondary role in the US’ global system of detaining and incarcerating persons suspected of involvement in terrorism that involved the setting up of “black sites” on the territory of countries around the world.
Current CIA Director Gina Haspel has been particularly criticised for her alleged involvement in the activities of an American-run black-site in Thailand.
Originally published by Sputnik
