{"id":369350,"date":"2018-07-14T07:03:04","date_gmt":"2018-07-14T06:03:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-shadow-of-torture-behind-trumps-britain-visit\/"},"modified":"2018-07-14T07:03:04","modified_gmt":"2018-07-14T06:03:04","slug":"the-shadow-of-torture-behind-trumps-britain-visit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-shadow-of-torture-behind-trumps-britain-visit\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shadow of Torture Behind Trump\u2019s Britain Visit"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/p>\n

As President Trump visits the United Kingdom, the focus has been on\u00a0strained trans-Atlantic relations, his intervention in domestic politics, and\u00a0massive\u00a0public\u00a0protests.<\/p>\n

A different, diplomatically-couched protest has received less attention but sends a consequential signal about the so-called \u201cspecial relationship\u201d between the two countries: U.K. parliamentarians are concerned that under Trump, America could return to a policy of torture \u2014 and they are warning British intelligence agencies to guard against it.<\/p>\n

Parliament\u2019s Intelligence and Security Committee released a pair<\/a> of reports<\/a> at the end of June providing extensive detail about U.K. complicity in torture, rendition, and other abuses of detainees by the U.S. military and the CIA during the George W. Bush administration. The reports by the committee, which oversees the U.K.\u2019s intelligence agencies, also focus on policy changes needed to avoid a repeat of such abuses.<\/p>\n

The committee uncovered at least 166 instances in which British officials either directly witnessed or had credible information suggesting that torture and abuse were carried out by Americans. It also found 232 cases in which U.K. personnel continued to interrogate or provide intelligence about a U.S.-held detainee even after they knew or suspected that the detainee had been abused. And there were 192 cases in which the U.K. accepted intelligence information obtained by the U.S. from detainees the U.K. knew or should have suspected had been tortured or abused.<\/p>\n

The committee found dozens of instances in which the U.K. provided intelligence or financial support to illegal U.S. \u201crenditions\u201d \u2014 in which the U.S. essentially kidnapping people and transferring them to third countries where they were subjected to torture and degrading treatment.<\/p>\n

The stories the committee tells are harrowing. It cites internal reports from U.K. intelligence officers who visited U.S. detention facilities and saw prisoners hooded and held in painful \u201cstress\u201d positions for hours on end. It describes the CIA\u2019s practice of forcing detainees into small wooden crates designed so that they could neither lie down nor stand up.<\/p>\n

The committee describes U.K. intelligence officials documenting detainees\u2019 accounts of sleep deprivation and other forms of abuse \u2014 and facing internal pressure from higher-ranking officials to remove those details from their reports. It tells of U.K. foreign service officers walking through the halls of the U.S. detention facility at Bagram Air Force base in Afghanistan, hearing \u201caudible screams\u201d coming from detainees. It describes how U.S. officials asked U.K. officers to leave an interrogation room so they would have \u201cplausible deniability\u201d when the U.S. interrogator \u201croughed up\u201d the detainee.<\/p>\n

How did the U.K. become the Best Supporting Actor in the U.S.\u2019s shameful torture drama? The committee suggests that British intelligence agencies may have been \u201cdeliberately turning a blind eye so as not to damage the relationship [with the U.S.] and risk the flow of intelligence.\u201d It notes that the U.K. is the \u201cjunior partner\u201d of American intelligence agencies, relying \u2014 perhaps over-relying \u2014 on the U.S. for intelligence. The committee also says that the U.K. let pressure to share intelligence distract from its obligations to uphold fundamental human rights.<\/p>\n

The U.K. intelligence agencies\u2019 own explanation to the parliamentary committee is that they were taken unaware by America\u2019s rapid abandonment, in the aftermath of 9\/11, of what the U.K. assumed was a shared set of basic values.<\/p>\n

The chief of the U.K.\u2019s Secret Intelligence Service noted that \u201cthere was an assumption prevailing that the U.S. would be behaving lawfully. Nothing in our previous experience before 2001 had led us to doubt that.\u201d As a result, he said, the U.K. failed for too long to \u201cjoin the dots\u201d and fully comprehend its complicity in torture and abuse by its closest ally.<\/p>\n

Whatever you think of this explanation from U.K. agencies mired in complicity with torture, we live now in less innocent times. The committee repeatedly refers to a current risk that the U.K. will once again be pressured to choose between complicity in torture and continued cooperation with America. It calls for further tightening of rules to prevent U.K. intelligence agencies from participating in interrogations and exchanging intelligence when there is a serious risk of involvement in torture or mistreatment.<\/p>\n

Ominously, the committee specifically refer to \u201cthe clear shift in focus signaled by the present US administration,\u201d and asserts that reliance on past U.S. assurances that U.K. territory will not be used for rendition \u201cis completely unsatisfactory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Diplomacy may have stopped the committee from naming the sources of its renewed concern, but there can be no doubt that President Trump and CIA Director Gina Haspel are those sources. After all, Trump has repeatedly advocated for a return to torture. And although he has not carried out that promise \u2014 or threat \u2014 he did succeed in getting the Senate to confirm a CIA director who oversaw torture, and participated in covering up and destroying torture evidence.<\/p>\n

Now, Prime Minister Theresa May is welcoming Trump. In advance of his arrival, the U.S. ambassador went on the BBC to extoll the \u201cspecial relationship\u201d between the two nations and laud the \u201cunprecedented interoperability\u201d of the American and British intelligence and security apparatus.<\/p>\n

But the looming fear of future complicity in rights violations threatens that relationship. When the U.K. parliamentarians released their reports, they warned, \u201cWe are unconvinced that the Government recognizes the seriousness of rendition and the potential for the UK to be complicit in actions which may lead to torture or CIDT\u201d \u2014 cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Nevertheless, they noted that U.K. intelligence agencies \u201care monitoring the actions of their US liaison partners in order to identify at an early stage any shift in policy on detainees.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trump is now straining America\u2019s traditional alliances in unprecedented ways. Even in these dark and turbulent times there is some good news \u2014 he should not count on America\u2019s Western allies to go along with any return to torture.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Via Common Dreams<\/a>. This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As President Trump visits the United Kingdom, the focus has been on\u00a0strained trans-Atlantic relations, his intervention in domestic politics, and\u00a0massive\u00a0public\u00a0protests. A different, diplomatically-couched protest has received less attention but sends a consequential signal about the so-called \u201cspecial relationship\u201d between the two countries: U.K. parliamentarians are concerned that under Trump, America could return to a policy […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":369351,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-369350","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369350","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=369350"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/369350\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/369351"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=369350"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=369350"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=369350"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}