Britain's secret service chief rejects torture allegations

Aug 10, 2009, 8:48 GMT

London - Britain's counter-espionage chief Monday rejected allegations of 'complicity in torture' levelled against officials of the overseas intelligence service (MI6).

'Our officers are as committed to the values and the human rights values of liberal democracy as anybody else,' John Scarlett, the outgoing chief of MI6 told the BBC in a radio documentary Monday.

'They also have the responsibility of protecting the country against terrorism and these issues need to be debated and understood in that context,' stressed Scarlett.

His comments came after a string of government ministers also denied the allegations, made in two recent parliamentary committee reports.

The reports by the Joint Human Rights Committee and the Foreign Affairs Select Committee have called for a public inquiry into the allegations, based mainly on the reported ill-treatment of terrorism suspects in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US.

Scarlett denied that British intelligence services had been compromised by their close relationship with their counterparts in the US.

'Our American allies know that we are our own service, that we are here to work for the British interests and the United Kingdom. We're an independent service working to our own laws - nobody else's - and to our own values.'

The allegations include the rendition and alleged abuse of Ethiopian national Binyam Mohamed from Pakistan to Morocco, prior to being taken to Guantanamo Bay on Cuba in 2004.

Mohamed, a British resident, was released from Guantanamo in February and returned to Britain, where he has started legal action against the government over claims of collusion in torture.

Meanwhile Kim Howells, the Labour Party chairman of the Intelligence and Security Committee, which scrutinizes the secret services, said the issue of Britain's complicity in torture had been 'clarified as far as it can be on the evidence that we have.'

He said his committee had found 'no evidence that there has been collusion between the intelligence services, any government department and governments that torture their individuals,' Howells told the BBC Monday.

But he added that 'no government on Earth' could guarantee that prisoners who had been picked up and held in another country had not had their human rights abused in some way.