UK spies said to be complicit in U.S. torture of terror suspects

LONDON — Britain’s intelligence services tolerated and abetted “inexcusable” abuse of terrorism suspects by their U.S. counterparts, according to a report released by Parliament on Thursday that offers a wideranging official condemnation of British intelligence conduct in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Many cases described by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee involved British agents feeding information to allies, primarily Americans, for the interrogation of detainees who they knew or suspected were being abused, or receiving intelligence from such interrogations, without raising objections.

The committee documented dozens of cases in which Britain participated in sending suspects to other countries that were known to use torture or aided others in doing so — a practice known as rendition. But it said that in four years of investigation, reviewing some 40,000 documents, it found only two instances of British agents directly taking part in abuse.

The report also says that considerable evidence makes it “difficult to comprehend” how top officials in London “did not recognize in this period the pattern of mistreatment by the U.S.” — abuses that the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee has documented in grisly detail and, in many cases, categorized as torture.

Prime Minister Theresa May accepted the findings but described the intelligence services’ moral lapses as a result of bad preparation rather than of malice. It took them “too long to understand fully and take appropriate action on the risks arising from our engagement with international partners,” she said in a statement released by her office.

But the release of the report also exposed a serious rift between May and the committee, led by Dominic Grieve, a lawmaker from her Conservative Party who is also a former attorney general.

The committee said that the prime minister had prohibited it from conducting most of the interviews it had requested with current and former intelligence agents, raising objections about security and about exposing agents to possible legal action. As a result, the committee said, its work was incomplete.

Rights groups seized on that point, demanding a further, fully independent investigation led by a judge. Kate Allen, Amnesty International’s director in Britain, said the committee “was prevented by the government from producing a thorough report about what really happened.”