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Fresh Suspicions Are Raised That UK 'Lobbied' to Keep Its Name Out of CIA Torture Report

The UK Foreign Office has admitted that government ministers met with senate officials, including US presidential hopeful Marco Rubio, several more times than previously disclosed.
Photo by J. Scott Applewhite/AP

When the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture was published last December with no reference to the UK, a string of British MPs reacted with disbelief. UK involvement in CIA illegal renditions — where prisoners were flown to countries where they could be tortured — had long been reported, though its full scope remained unknown. How could the UK have escaped mention in 525 pages on the War on Terror?

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Campaigners immediately suspected that the UK had lobbied the US to keep its name out of the extensively-redacted report (the 525-page executive summary that was published represented just a fraction of the full 6,000-page document) — suspicions that were heightened because the day before the report's release itemerged cabinet ministers and diplomats had met with members of the Senate committee 24 times during the four years the report was being prepared.

Now, in a letter seen by VICE News, it has emerged that senior members of the British government had an additional five meetings with a committee member who was vigorously opposed to the report's publication, in the 12 months preceding its release.

The UK Foreign Office has denied that ministers discussed the upcoming report in five meetings that were held during 2013 and 2014 with Senator Marco Rubio. Now a frontrunner in the race to become the Republicans' 2016 presidential candidate, Rubio sat on the Senate Intelligence Committee as it conducted its inquiry into CIA torture, and was highly critical of the process, saying the publication of the report would seriously damage US security.

"It's now clear that far more meetings took place than were initially disclosed, with a committee member who was avowedly anti-publication of the report," said Kat Craig, the legal director of human rights organization Reprieve, which got a letter from the Foreign Office confirming the meetings, following a freedom of information request.

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Related: Exclusive: CIA interrogations took place on British territory of Diego Garcia, senior Bush administration official says. Read more here.

"At no point during these meetings [with Senator Rubio] did UK Ministers raise or discuss the US Senate Intelligence Committee's report into torture by the Central Intelligence Agency," said the Foreign Office in the letter to Reprieve.

But Reprieve says more clarification is needed. "The British government has already had to correct its position on this several times - there can be no more room for obfuscation," Craig told VICE News. "This latest revelation shows yet again that the only way to deal with Britain's involvement in the terrible abuses of the 'War on Terror' is through a proper, independent inquiry."

In December a spokesperson for Prime Minister David Cameron acknowledged that the UK had been granted redactions to the report in advance of publication, but said they were requested purely on "national security grounds" and did not contain anything to suggest UK involvement in torture or rendition.

An investigation by British parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee agreed in February that the redactions had not been made to avoid embarrassment to the UK authorities, though admitted its evidence had been very limited. "We note that the UK agencies were at no stage provided with the draft reports. Rather they were given sight of heavily edited extracts, which they could not retain. We have seen the agencies' internal file notes, but not the specific redactions proposed by the CIA," said the committee at the time.

However, suspicions remain that redactions were made in an attempt to hide the involvement of US allies in the post-9/11 renditions and torture program.

In January Lawrence Wilkerson, a former Bush administration official, told VICE News that CIA interrogations of US prisoners had secretly taken place on the British territory of Diego Garcia, and that the atoll had been used as a "transit location" for the US government's "nefarious activities".

However, there is no mention of UK intelligence agencies or Diego Garcia, which is leased to the US as a military base, in the US Senate and Intelligence Committee's report.

Follow Ben Bryant on Twitter: @benbryant