On The eve of the first visit to Washington by the new British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a report by a high-level UK Parliamentary committee sharply criticised the Bush administration’s practice of seizing terrorism suspects for interrogation in other countries. The panel also found that, in one case, the Americans showed a lack of concern for the position of the British, their closest ally. The practice, known as rendition, presented “some ethical dilemmas” for the British and led them to conclude that they had different approaches from the Americans, the report by the Intelligence and Security Committee said. One British official told the panel that he did not believe the early reports of American torture against terror suspects in mid-2003. But after the abuses at Abu Ghraib emerged, the British government was “fully aware of the risk of mistreatment associated with any operations that may result in US custody of detainees,” the report found. “When you are talking about sharing secret intelligence, we still trust them, but we have a better recognition that their standards, their approaches, are different, and therefore, we still have to work with them, but we work with them in a rather different fashion,” an official of one of the security services told the panel in March, the report said. The report withheld the official’s name, and it did not mention what that “different fashion” of collaboration was.Britain has pulled out of some planned covert operations with the CIA, including a major one in 2005, when it was unable to obtain assurances that the actions would not result in rendition and inhumane treatment, the report said. “We have in all cases with respect to those issues operated with full respect of the sovereignty of our partners and allies,” said David Johnson, deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in London, when asked about the report.On the positive side, the report found that some of the information the Americans obtained during interrogations of Qaeda suspects and passed to the British helped thwart some terrorist attacks in Britain. The Intelligence and Security Committee Report on Rendition was completed and sent to Brown during his first days in office in late June. On Wednesday, the prime minister sent it to Parliament and it became a public document. The report is available at cabinetoffice.gov.uk report comes as Brown is to meet President Bush at Camp David on Sunday. At a news conference this week, Brown said he wanted to be a steward of the close American-British alliance. But he has also indicated he wants to establish a different tone from that of his predecessor, Tony Blair, who maintained a personal bond with the US president. By scheduling a visit to the United Nations on Monday immediately after Camp David, Brown was already showing a little distance, an official in London said.
