A parliamentary committee investigating possible British links to torture will request access to blacked out parts of a US Senate report on CIA treatment of Al-Qaeda suspects, its chairman said Sunday.
The news comes amid growing questions in Britain about whether its intelligence services made use of information extracted by the CIA using brutal and unauthorized tactics in the years after the 9/11 attacks, according to the AFP.
Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said key figures in Britain’s Labor government at the time including former prime minister Tony Blair should face questions on the issue.
Malcolm Rifkind, the chairman of parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee, said it would ask for access to secret parts of the US report but was not confident that the request would be successful.
The US Senate Intelligence Committee report released last week said that CIA torture had been more brutal than previously acknowledged, badly supervised and ineffective.
Detainees were beaten, waterboarded and humiliated through the painful use of “rectal feeding” and “rectal rehydration,” it added.
Defense Secretary Michael Fallon, of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party, told this week’s Sunday Telegraph that Blair and others should give a public account of what they knew of such activities.
Downing Street said last week that British intelligence had spoken to counterparts in the US about removing some sections of the Senate report but added that this was on “national security grounds”, not to cover up any role it played.
