British spy agencies are under growing pressure to reveal how closely they worked with their US counterparts following 9/11 after a damning US Senate report exposed how the CIA tortured terror suspects.
The revelations, published on Tuesday, have dragged Britain’s domestic spy agency MI5 and its foreign intelligence counterpart MI6 back into the spotlight and led to calls for a full judge-led inquiry. Britain was Washington’s closest partner in the “War on Terror” and questions about British involvement in abuses have rankled for years, along with doubts about the close alignment with US foreign policy.
Tom Davies from Amnesty International said Britain seemed “afraid to turn over the rock for fear of what it will find underneath.”
The British-based rights group has launched an online petition calling for the opening of a criminal investigation that had received nearly 14,000 signatures by Friday. Britain’s press has also been unusually united in demanding that the public know what the security services did on their behalf.
“America now knows the truth about what it did. We in Britain do not,” Jenni Russell wrote in a Times comment piece demanding the publication of details about British involvement that were “removed” from the US report.
Prime Minister David Cameron admitted in 2010 that “there are questions over the degree to which British officers were working with foreign security services who were treating detainees in ways they should not have done.”
He then asked retired judge Peter Gibson to lead an independent investigation, which produced a preliminary report that raised 27 serious queries about the behavior of British security officers. Specifically, Gibson said he wished to investigate “whether in some cases, UK officers may have turned a blind eye to the use of specific, inappropriate techniques or threats used by others.” Parliament’s intelligence and security committee (ISC) then took over the reins and is due to publish its conclusions at the end of 2015, but that is unlikely to dampen calls for further action. “Once the police investigations are done, once this report from the Intelligence and Security Committee is done, we should keep an open mind ... about moving to a full judicial inquiry if there are any outstanding questions,” Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said Thursday. “I, like everybody else, want the truth out there.”
British intelligence services are particularly concerned by the case of the Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed, who was detained in Guantanamo for more than four years before being transferred to Britain in February 2009.
Mohamed claims that a member of MI5 provided questions to be asked during an interrogation, which involved torture, at a secret site in Morocco.
London is also accused of complicity in the kidnapping of Abdelhakim Belhaj, a former militant who became military commander of Tripoli after the fall of Muammar Qaddafi in 2011. When asked about the possibility of a full inquiry, Cameron’s office said it would adopt a “wait-and-see” policy pending the conclusions of the parliamentary committee investigating the claims.
