THE REPORT by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) very belatedly exposes the CIA torture regime that was imposed after the 2001 Twin Towers attack.
The attack was greeted by Bush as a signal to attack Afghanistan and then Iraq, the former for hosting Osama bin Laden, and the latter for refusing to bend the knee sufficiently before the USA.
The attack on Iraq was based on lies, that Iraq had WMDs and could use them at any time!
Britain’s agreement with the US, both in facilitating a torture regime and in attacking Afghanistan and Iraq, was 100% under the Blair-Brown government.
Once the CIA torturers were given the go-ahead by Bush, Britain was also enthusiastic that the UK could use its facilities on Diego Garcia and that the UK would aid rendition throughout the world.
The US Senate report confirms that the CIA tortured suspects at secret overseas sites for years, achieved nothing, and lied about it all, including to the President of the USA.
The torture treatment included being kept awake for up to 180 hours; being shackled and held in stress positions for days; being waterboarded repeatedly in ‘a series of near drownings’; having their families threatened, and being force-fed via the rectum with the biggest tube available.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times because he did not reveal the details of a plot which was later discovered never to have existed.
The CIA lied about the success of its operations. To curry British favour, it claimed to have cracked a plot to crash hijacked planes into Heathrow Airport.
In fact, the CIA torture regime and the activities of its British helpers laid the basis for the strengthening of jihadist movements worldwide, as a ‘legitimate response’ to ‘Western Christian barbarism’.
In fact, what the Senate Committee has released is a 480-page summary of the report.
It has been revealed that the Committee chair fought to retain significant details about the involvement of Britain and other US allies in the torture programme, in vain.
In August, records published under Britain’s Freedom of Information (FoI) Act pointed to the British government lobbying US officials to sanitise the report, and obscure the UK’s role in CIA rendition.
UK ambassador to the US, Peter Westmacott, engaged in at least 21 separate meetings with members of the SSCI prior to publication.
In fact, British foreign territory Diego Garcia was used to transfer detainees via rendition flights on numerous occasions.
UK intelligence officers interrogated prisoners detained in Guantánamo Bay and at Bagram in Afghanistan, in full knowledge that they were being tortured.
It has also emerged that the British government offered logistical support for key aircraft in CIA rendition exercises, permitting them to refuel at UK military and civilian airports hundreds of times.
In 2013, the British government shelved a state inquiry into Britain’s role in CIA rendition.
An inquiry is now expected to be managed by Britain’s intelligence and security committee – a group of peers and MPs who concluded seven years ago that Britain bore no complicity in CIA rendition practices.
Even the UK’s leading human rights organisations have declared a boycott against the new ‘inquiry’.
In fact, the truth is that the revelations of the Democratic majority of the US Senate Select Committee could never be replicated in the UK, where the secret activities of the capitalist state are kept secret, as are the affairs and misdemeanours of the ruling class.
In fact, legislation is being carried continually to give the state more power to spy, and jail and even exclude British citizens from the UK, to the point where even police chiefs are complaining that Britain is ‘drifting’ into becoming a police state, where only the ruling class is free.
In fact, to get to the truth about Britain’s state secrets, from the activities of the Loyalist murder gangs in the north of Ireland, to the continuing support for the CIA’s torture machine, a socialist revolution will be required.
The state is an instrument of ruling class repression. Its secrets will never be voluntarily surrendered. Only a socialist revolution will be able to open all the files and get to the real truth about how the UK state became the junior partner of the CIA’s terror machine, and all of the services it provided.
