Britain Discloses Data on Ex-Detainee
By JOHN F. BURNS
NYT
LONDON — The British government lost a protracted court battle on Wednesday to protect secret American intelligence information about the treatment of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee, and immediately published details of what it called the “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” administered to the prisoner by American officials.
The seven paragraphs published on the Foreign Office Web site summarized secret information provided by American intelligence officials to Britain’s security service, MI5, on the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a 31-year-old Ethiopian. Mr. Mohamed, the son of an Ethiopian Airlines official, moved to Britain as a teenager and left in 2000 for Pakistan, where he was arrested in April 2002 on suspicion of terrorist links.
Under intense American pressure, Foreign Office lawyers had sought for more than a year to prevent publication of the information. Citing warnings from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others, they argued that the summary’s publication could cause irrevocable damage to intelligence-sharing between the United States and Britain — a relationship that British officials said was essential to Britain’s security, in particular to its counterterrorist operations.
After the court ruling, Mr. Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, who has handled many cases involving Guantánamo detainees, was bitterly critical of the “the shameful way” in which the British government had battled to keep secret what it knew of Mr. Mohamed’s treatment. “Suppressing any evidence of government criminality on the grounds of national security sets a very dangerous precedent,” he said in a comment posted on the Web site of The Guardian.
(More here.)
NYT
LONDON — The British government lost a protracted court battle on Wednesday to protect secret American intelligence information about the treatment of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee, and immediately published details of what it called the “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” administered to the prisoner by American officials.
The seven paragraphs published on the Foreign Office Web site summarized secret information provided by American intelligence officials to Britain’s security service, MI5, on the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a 31-year-old Ethiopian. Mr. Mohamed, the son of an Ethiopian Airlines official, moved to Britain as a teenager and left in 2000 for Pakistan, where he was arrested in April 2002 on suspicion of terrorist links.
Under intense American pressure, Foreign Office lawyers had sought for more than a year to prevent publication of the information. Citing warnings from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others, they argued that the summary’s publication could cause irrevocable damage to intelligence-sharing between the United States and Britain — a relationship that British officials said was essential to Britain’s security, in particular to its counterterrorist operations.
After the court ruling, Mr. Mohamed’s lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, who has handled many cases involving Guantánamo detainees, was bitterly critical of the “the shameful way” in which the British government had battled to keep secret what it knew of Mr. Mohamed’s treatment. “Suppressing any evidence of government criminality on the grounds of national security sets a very dangerous precedent,” he said in a comment posted on the Web site of The Guardian.
(More here.)
Powered by Blogger
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home