CIA torture report released: latest news

The Telegraph

CIA lied to Senate and White House on torture methods: report • Torture 'brutal' and 'far worse' than CIA claimed • US risks losing moral authority over torture, suggests Cameron • CIA falsely claim UK terror plots foiled due to torture • How waterboarding reduced even interrogators to tears
• Key findings ; executive summary ; report in full

21.16 The Senate torture report implicates the UK and there is an urgent need “to get to the bottom of our own involvement”, said Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative chairman of Commons Treasury select committee, who led an investigation into so-called rendition flights, said the report. 

It’s impossible to tell how much the report has been redacted or reduced, cut, to take out the extent of the involvement of other countries, in particular America’s closest ally the United Kingdom. 

I think it is quite likely that we will find that those redactions are very heavy. There is a non-aggression pact on this, where the UK on the basis of something called the control principle does not release information that they have been given by the United States security forces, and likewise the Americans don’t do so in reverse.” 

For that reason we may find that key chunks that we would have liked to see in this report have been omitted. But that is no substitute and the publication of report should be no substitute for us in the UK getting to the bottom of this.’

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See also: Torture report revelations: Gestapo 2.0 - Hitler would be pleased

British Government Accused Of ‘Cover-up’ Over Rendition Files

RINF

A director at legal charity Reprieve, which is representing Libyan Abdel Hakim Belhadj who claims he was on a rendition flight through Diego Garcia, has slammed the Foreign Office’s excuse for losing rendition flight records, labelling it a cover-up.

Cori Crider, a director at the charity, said:

”It’s looking worse and worse for the UK government on Diego Garcia.
”First we learn the Senate’s forthcoming torture report says detainees were held on the island, and now – conveniently – a pile of key documents turn up missing with ‘water damage’?
”The Government might as well have said the dog ate their homework. This smacks of a cover-up. They now need to come clean about how, when, and where this evidence was lost.”

The records, if compete, would cast new light on the UK’s complicity in the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme, Foreign Office are claiming that documents have been lost due to “water damage”.

 

MI5 stands accused of complicity in torture this year after 'trying to recruit man from Egyptian jail

The Independent

MI5 faces claims that it has been complicit in torture as recently as this February, after a former British resident told how he was beaten by Egyptian security forces working closely with the UK.

Ahmed Diini, 25, alleges that he was questioned by a member of MI5 earlier this year while being tortured in an Egyptian prison. The claim challenges assurances given by Britain’s security and intelligence agencies last year that they no longer take part in operations where a suspect is being tortured or illegally detained by a foreign state.

In November, the head of MI5 told MPs that his officers would never participate in or condone torture.

Mr Diini, a grandson of the deposed Somalian dictator Mohamed Siad Barre, alleges that during his eight months’ imprisonment in Cairo he was shackled, hooded, repeatedly beaten, stripped and threatened that his wife would be raped. He also alleges he was threatened with electrocution and being whipped.

In a letter written from his prison cell and smuggled to his lawyer, Mr Diini says that during his detention and torture he was visited this year by a British man who, he believes, works for MI5. He says the man promised him his freedom if he agreed to work for the security service.

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UK rendition and torture collusion inquiry scrapped

Oh, the shock....Oh the surprise....Another whitewash.

BBC News

A controversial inquiry into allegations of wrongdoing by the UK's security services is being scrapped.  Justice Secretary Ken Clarke said the inquiry into the treatment of detainees could not continue because of Metropolitan Police investigations. 

These follow fresh allegations that officials assisted the rendition of men to Libya, where they were tortured. Mr Clarke said the government was committed to holding a judge-led inquiry once these were investigated. 

The Detainee Inquiry, headed by retired judge Sir Peter Gibson, was launched by the prime minister to get to the bottom of claims that MI5 and MI6 had aided and abetted the rendition and ill-treatment of terrorism suspects in the wake of 9/11. 

In July 2010 when he announced the "fully independent" inquiry, David Cameron had said that to ignore the claims of wrongdoing would risk secret operatives' reputation "being tarnished". But the inquiry had been widely criticised by campaign groups and lawyers representing detainees who were refusing to take part, saying it lacked transparency and credibility. 

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CIA 'Secret Prison' Found in Romania

 

Former CIA operatives said the building 

was used to interrogate terrorism suspects, 

including Khaled Sheikh Mohammed

BBC News

The CIA operated a secret prison in the Romanian capital Bucharest where terrorism suspects were interrogated, an investigation by the Associated Press and German media has found.

Former CIA operatives identified the building where, they said, detainees were held and tortured.

The building belongs to a Romanian agency, Orniss, which stores classified information from the EU and Nato.

Orniss has denied hosting a CIA prison and the CIA has refused to comment.

The investigation, by the Sueddeutsche Zeitung newspaper and the German TV network ARD, said those held in the secret prison included Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, who has admitted organising the 9/11 attacks.

He was seized in Pakistan in March 2003 under the US programme known as "extraordinary rendition" - the extra-judicial detention and transfer of terrorism suspects.

He has been in the US detention centre at Guantanamo Bay since 2006, where he is awaiting trial. 

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Britain and European governments helped US commit 'countless’ crimes colluding with torture

Telegraph

Britain and other European governments have helped the US commit “countless” crimes by colluding with torture and illegal rendition operations in America’s war on terror, Europe’s human rights watchdog has said. Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s rights commissioner, accused governments of being “deeply complicit” in illegal activities carried out by the US over the last 10 years, since the September 11 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. “In attempting to combat crimes attributed to terrorists, countless further crimes have been committed in the course of the US-led 'global war on terror’,” he said. “Many of those crimes have been carefully and deliberately covered up.” 

A 2007 Council of Europe (COE) report by Dick Marty, Swiss MP, accused Britain and 13 other European governments of allowing the CIA to run secret detention centres, of turning a blind eye to torture and the illegal abductions of terror suspects. Mr Hammerberg accused Europe’s governments of blocking investigations into rendition in line with Washington’s wishes. “So far Europe has granted effective impunity to those who committed crimes in implementing the rendition policy. An urgent rethink is required to prevent this misjudged and failed counter terrorism approach from having a sad legacy of injustice,” said Mr Hammerberg.

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N.Y. billing dispute reveals details of secret CIA rendition flights

Washington Post

Details of shadowy CIA [rendition flights] have emerged in a ... New York courthouse in a billing dispute between contractors. The court documents offer a rare glimpse of the costs and operations of the controversial rendition program. For all the secrecy that once surrounded the CIA program, a significant part of its operation was entrusted to very small aviation companies whose previous experience involved flying sports teams across the country. In the process, the costs and itineraries of numerous CIA flights became part of the court record. The more than 1,500 pages from the trial and appeals court files appear to include sensitive material, such as logs of air-to-ground phone calls made from the plane. These logs show multiple calls to CIA headquarters; to the cell- and home phones of a senior CIA official involved in the rendition program; and to a government contractor, Falls Church-based DynCorp, that worked for the CIA. 

Attorneys for a London-based legal charity, Reprieve, which has been investigating the CIA program, discovered the Columbia County case and brought the court records to the attention of The Washington Post. “This new evidence tells a chilling story, from the CIA’s efforts to disguise its illegal activities to the price it paid to ferry prisoners to torture chambers across the world,” said Cori Crider, Reprieve’s legal director.

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Human rights groups boycott rendition and torture inquiry

Independent

The inquiry into whether British security services were complicit in the rendition and torture of terrorism suspects was thrown into chaos yesterday when a key group of human rights lawyers and campaign organisations pulled out. 

The boycott was sparked by the publication of the inquiry's protocols which ruled that the Government would have the final say over whether the material uncovered during proceedings could be made public.

Lawyers representing former detainees of Guantanamo and secret prisons abroad said their clients would also be unable to cross-examine evidence or witnesses, describing the torture inquiry as "secretive and toothless". In a joint letter to the inquiry, the 10 groups – including Liberty, Amnesty and Reprieve – said they felt compelled to boycott proceedings because of the lack of "credibility or transparency". 

A spokeswoman for the inquiry insisted that it would still go ahead. She said the inquiry "would welcome" evidence to back up claims of the involvement by UK agencies and said of the boycott: "We hope they will reconsider their decision." 

They Call This Justice. Supreme Court Gives CIA Torturers, Boeing a Free Pass

antifascistcalling

On May 16, in another shameless capitulation to the Executive Branch, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to review a lawsuit brought by victims of CIA torture, handing Jeppesen DataPlan, a subsidiary of defense giant Boeing, a free pass for services "rendered" as the Agency's booking agent.

In 2007, the American Civil Liberties filed a landmark lawsuit, Mohamed et. al. vs. Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc., on behalf of five victims of the Bush administration's so-called "extraordinary rendition" kidnap and torture program.

The five men, Binyam Mohamed, Ahmed Agiza, Abou Elkassim Britel, Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah and Bisher al-Rawi, claimed with copious evidence to back their assertions, that their "rendition" and torture was facilitated by the Boeing subsidiary.

Not a single plaintiff was ever charged with a so-called "terrorism" offense let alone convicted of a crime in open court. That didn't stop America's shadow warriors from kidnapping, drugging and then whisking them away--aboard aircraft provided by Jeppesen--to CIA "black sites" or the dungeons of close U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East.  [...]