British MPs seek monitoring of US use of Indian Ocean base

* Lawmakers call for Washington to reveal scope of activities it undertakes on Diego Garcia




LONDON: Britain should more closely monitor US activity on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia to ensure American officials are not using the British territory for the rendition or interrogation of terror suspects, a group of UK lawmakers said on Sunday.




A committee of parliamentarians said the UK needs to press its ally to reveal the full extent of its activities on the remote but strategically important air base - halfway between Africa and Southeast Asia - which has been leased to the US to be used as a military base since the 1970s.




Britain's Foreign Office had claimed the US offered assurances that the outpost has not been used to detain suspects. But in February 2008 the US acknowledged that previous denials that the island had been used by so-called extraordinary rendition flights had been wrong. The State Department said it had misled the British government, and confirmed that two suspects had been on flights that refueled on Diego Garcia en route to Guantanamo Bay and Morocco in 2002.




The move deeply embarrassed the British government, which insisted until early last year that the practice did not happen. Lawmakers on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee said in a report that it is "deplorable that previous US assurances about rendition flights through Diego Garcia have turned out to be false" and said the incident had undermined Britain's trust in US assurances.




It said the government should keep a closer eye on what the US is doing on Diego Garcia - for example by keeping meticulous records of US planes and ships transiting through the island and by demanding the names, so far held secret, of the two men transferred through Diego Garcia in 2002. The report also pressed the government to clarify whether the 2002 incident broke British law.




Britain's relationship with Pakistan also came under the microscope. The report warned that using information supplied by foreign intelligence agencies implicated in the torture could amount to complicity in the abuse - and singled out Pakistan's intelligence service as a particularly problematic partner. It recommended that Britain be emphatic with its foreign partners that torture is unacceptable.




Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Britain did not collude in torture, but acknowledged the country could not guarantee how detainees were treated by foreign governments. "Operations have been halted where the risk of mistreatment was judged to be too high. But it is not possible to eradicate all risk. Judgments need to be made," he said in an article co-written with Home Secretary Alan Johnson in The Sunday Telegraph newspaper. ap