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The War Profiteers - War Crimes,
Kidnappings & Torture |
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February 11th,
2010 - Prosecutors Consider Charges Against Officers from MI5 and MI6 News article from Daily Telegraph News article from the Guardian |
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Prosecutors Consider
Torture Charges Against Officers from MI5 and MI6 Senior prosecution lawyers are being consulted by police over the
possibility of bringing criminal charges against two British intelligence
officers suspected of complicity in torture. By Gordon Rayner & Duncan Gardham Daily Telegraph February 11, 2010 An MI5 officer who
interviewed the former Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed and an MI6
officer involved in an unrelated case are waiting to find out if they will be
prosecuted following an 11-month Scotland Yard investigation. The inquiry into the MI5
officer, known as Witness B, is believed to be at an advanced stage, with
police seeking advice from the Crown Prosecution Service on whether charges
could be brought either under the Criminal Justice Act or the Human Rights
Act. Both cases were referred to
police by the intelligence services, following internal reviews of the role
of officers in interrogating terrorism suspects. Details about Witness B’s
alleged complicity in the torture of Mr Mohamed emerged on Wednesday when the
Court of Appeal ordered the publication of previously censored information
about MI5’s knowledge of his treatment. The court said that Mr
Mohamed had been deprived of sleep, shackled and threatened with the
suggestion that he would “disappear” and that MI5 were fully aware of this. Mr Mohamed has also claimed
that Witness B fed questions to his CIA interrogators in the knowledge that
he was being tortured. The Master of the Rolls,
Lord Neuberger, said in a draft judgment that MI5 did not “respect human
rights or abjure participation in coercive interrogation techniques” and that
“this was particularly true of Witness B”. His comments were deleted
from the final version of the judgment after an intervention from a barrister
representing the Foreign Secretary, but were referred to in a copy of a
letter which was leaked to the media. Witness B admitted in 2008,
during High Court hearings into Mr Mohamed’s treatment that he questioned Mr
Mohamed after his arrest in Pakistan, but he stopped giving evidence in case
he incriminated himself. It is alleged that he knew
Mr Mohamed was about to be “rendered” to Morocco and told him when he offered
him a cup of tea: “Where you are going you need a lot of sugar.” Wednesday’s Appeal Court
judgment revealed that Witness B “saw himself as having a role to play in
conjunction with the US authorities in inducing [Mr Mohamed] to co-operate by
making it clear that the United Kingdom would not help unless [Mr Mohamed]
co-operated.” Detectives have declined to
release any details about the case involving the MI6 officer, though concerns
have previously been reported about a Secret Intelligence Service officer who
attended an interrogation by the US military in Afghanistan of a man who had
previously had a nervous breakdown. The Human Rights Act 2000
prohibits torture, inhumane or degrading treatment and the Criminal Justice
Act prohibits violence against prisoners. If either officer was
charged, they would face an unprecedented criminal trial to determine whether
work they carried out on behalf of the state was legitimate. In March last year Baroness
Scotland, the Attorney General, asked police to investigate Mr Mohamed’s
claims that he was tortured, and in July the Met announced that a team of
detectives led by deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, of its specialist
crime directorate, had begun a formal investigation. Ethiopian-born Mr Mohamed,
31, who was granted refugee status when he came to Britain in 1994, spent
seven years in custody after he was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 as he tried
to leave the country using a false passport. He told investigators he had
travelled to Pakistan and Afghanistan in an attempt to kick a drug addiction,
but was accused of links to Al-Qaeda and charged with plotting to blow up a
radioactive “dirty bomb” in the US. The charges were later dropped when the
US admitted its case was based on confessions obtained using torture. External link: http://tinyurl.com/yhmcfpt Binyam Mohamed:
How MI5 misled parliament’s intelligence and security committee Evidence over “paragraph 168” shows that security services did know of
deliberate US strategy of sleep deprivation, rendition threats and shackling By David Leigh & Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian February 11, 2010 One of the gravest
revelations so far made about the missing "paragraph 168" of this
week's appeal court judgment in the Binyam Mohamed case is that parliament's
intelligence and security committee (ISC) was misled by MI5. Government lawyer Jonathan
Sumption QC, in a letter demanding the deletion of paragraph 168, confirmed
this, pointing out that the judgment stated: "Officials of the service
deliberately misled the ISC." He was referring to evidence given to a
secret session of the ISC on 23 November 2006 by the then head of MI5, Eliza
Manningham-Buller. She was testifying about events in May 2002 that took
place under her predecessor, Stephen Lander. According to the ISC's later
heavily redacted report, Manningham-Buller and her team denied all knowledge
of Mohamed's ill-treatment. The committee - chaired by the former Northern
Ireland secretary Paul Murphy - was told: "A member of the security service
did interview [Mohamed] once for a period of approximately three hours while
he was detained in Karachi in 2002." The interrogator, later known as
Witness B, was "an experienced officer" who conducted the interview
"in line with the services' guidance to staff on contact with
detainees". The ISC recorded: "The
security service denies that the officer told [Mohamed] he would be tortured
as he alleges … He did not observe any abuse and … no instances of abuse were
mentioned by [Mohamed]." Murphy's committee duly
reassured the public that although MI5 conceded they had not demanded
specific assurances from the US that Mohamed was being properly treated:
"This is understandable given the lack of knowledge at the time of any
possible consequences of US custody of detainees." That part of the published
ISC report now appears to have been untrue. The judges found that MI5 had 42
documents, detailing how both Witness B and "persons senior to Witness
B" had been briefed in detail at the time about how the US was
deliberately ill-treating Mohamed as part of a "new strategy",
systematically depriving him of sleep, terrifying him with threats of
rendition and shackling him in interrogations. But the courts did not
accuse Manningham-Buller personally of deceit, ruling earlier that although
the existence of the 42 files had been withheld from the ISC: "The
evidence was that earlier searches made had not discovered them." Witness B is being investigated
by the Metropolitan police for "possible criminal wrongdoing", the
government says. External link: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/11/binyam-mohamed-mi5-misled-intelligence-committee British spy chief slams
torture claims From Agence France Presse February 11, 2010 London - The head of
Britain's domestic spy service Friday defended his organisation's work amid
an escalating row over claims it tried to cover up its involvement in
torture. Writing in the Daily
Telegraph, MI5 director-general Jonathan Evans hit out at the allegation from
one of Britain's most senior judges that the agency had a "culture of
suppression." In rare public comments, he
said the accusation - which came in a draft court ruling relating to the case
of a Guantanamo Bay inmate - was the "precise opposite of the
truth." He admitted that British
intelligence was "slow to detect" US mistreatment of detainees
after the September 11 attacks in the United States. But he added: "We in
the (British) agencies did not practise mistreatment or torture then and do
not do so now, nor do we collude or encourage others to torture on our
behalf." In his harsh critcism of
MI5, which was removed from the final published court judgement but leaked
out, Judge Lord Neuberger also accused the service of failing to respect
human rights and misleading parliament. Judges handed down the
ruling Wednesday as they ordered the release of once-secret information about
the case of former detainee Binyam Mohamed, which showed he had been subject
to abuse at the hands of US authorities. The CIA had passed the
information to British intelligence, and judges released it after Foreign
Secretary David Miliband lost an appeal court bid. The publication of the
seven-paragraph summary showing Britain was aware of the US authorities'
abuse, combined with the judge's criticism, has intensified a row here about
MI5's alleged attempts to conceal its collusion in torture. Evans also warned that
Britain's enemies could use the escalating row as "propaganda to
undermine our will and ability to confront them." Ethiopian-born Mohamed - who
came to Britain in 1994 seeking asylum - claims that in Morocco in 2002 he
was questioned by people using information that could only have come from the
British intelligence service. Miliband disclosed Wednesday
that police were investigating allegations of criminal actions by a British
official linked to the case. Mohamed was arrested in
Pakistan in 2002 while trying to return to Britain and spent nearly seven
years in US custody or in countries taking part in the US-run rendition
programme of terror suspects. After a lengthy campaign by
his supporters, he became the first prisoner to be released from Guantanamo
under the Obama presidency and returned to Britain in February last year. Copyright © 2010 AFP. External link: http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5glNgT2BPY87EoB2bLFGNeq3rcpzw |