By David Rose | The Daily Mail/UK, July 25, 2009
The CIA has been secretly pressuring the British Government to help it cover up its use of torture, documents filed in the High Court have revealed.
The documents, to be discussed at a hearing this week, suggest that the UK authorities did everything they could to accede to the CIA’s wishes while at the same time trying to conceal the fact they were talking to the agency.
It is the latest twist in the saga of Binyam Mohamed, 30, the Ethiopian UK resident released from Guantanamo Bay in February after seven years in US captivity.
In an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday earlier this year, he told how he was captured in Pakistan, interrogated by the CIA, tortured, then sent to Morocco for further ‘medieval’ torture on a CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’ flight.
After 18 months there, he was tortured again in the CIA’s ‘dark prison’ in Afghanistan. He alleged that UK officials from MI5 were ‘complicit’ in his ordeal.
In a judgment in July last year, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones wrote a seven-paragraph summary of Mr Mohamed’s treatment, based on documents by US intelligence officials. The judges said this amounted to evidence he was tortured.
But the summary has been ‘redacted’ because Foreign Secretary David Miliband insists that if the court were to publish it, US intelligence agencies would cease to share information with Britain, so damaging UK security.
The court will make a final decision about publication after the hearing this week.
The only piece of evidence Mr Miliband’s lawyers have produced is a letter, redacted, unsigned and undated, with its letterhead concealed, which, they say, summarises the views of US President Barack Obama’s administration.
It states: ‘Public disclosure of the information contained in the seven paragraphs could likely result in serious damage to UK and US national security.
‘If it is determined that HMG [Her Majesty's Government] is unable to protect information we provide to it, even if that inability is caused by your judicial system, we will necessarily have to review with the greatest care the sensitivity of information we can provide in future.’
After an order from the judges, Government lawyers were forced to admit the letter had been sent to an unnamed officer in MI6, and had been written by someone at the CIA.
Former Shadow Home Secretary David Davis said it was ‘deeply disappointing that the British Government seems to have been prepared to do the CIA’s bidding’.
Tags: Binyam Mohamed, British government, British officials, CIA, extraordinary rendition, torture
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