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Miliband defends keeping alleged US torture evidence secret

IRNA - Islamic Republic News Agency

London, Feb 5, IRNA – Foreign Secretary David Miliband Thursday defended the non-disclosure of US intelligence in the case of the alleged CIA torture of a British resident in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp insisting it would damage national security.

Miliband also rejected suggestions that the US had threatened to "break off" cooperation with the UK if it had made public documents on the US treatment of 30-year old Ethiopian-born Binyam Mohamed.

"The issue at stake is not the content of the intelligence material but the principle at the heart of all intelligence relationships – that a country retains control of its intelligence information and it cannot be disclosed by foreign authorities without its consent,” he said.

The foreign secretary was making a statement in parliament following a High Court ruling on Wednesday, alleging that Britain was complicit with American authorities in the torture of Binyam and that the US prevented the evidence from being made public.

Opposition parties had called on Miliband to explain what the judges said and clarify whether the new Obama administration supported its predecessor's stance on the issue.

Liberal Democrat leader, Nick Clegg, said there was "no excuse" for withholding the information, dismissing Miliband’s argument by saying that "everybody understands that some intelligence needs to be kept secret.”

"People reading the newspapers this morning will think it smacks of a cover-up," Clegg said. “There is no excuse not to make that information public," he told the BBC.

The Conservative’s shadow foreign secretary, William Hague, urged the government to press the new Obama administration to release the documents, particularly since the courts did not appear to agree with the foreign secretary that they contained any sensitive material.

"Given the change in administration in the US two weeks ago, the changes in policy that have resulted and the changes in personnel in the CIA in the last fortnight, would it not be right to put it to the US administration that it could change its approach to this case without fundamentally breaching the principle of which you have rightly spoken?" Hague asked.

In his statement, Miliband insisted that the US intelligence documents had been given to Mohamed's US lawyers were "highly classified" and would have been wrong to have made them public against the wishes of the US because it would "cause real and significant damage to the national security and international relations of this country."

He reiterated that the UK did not "condone, authorise or cooperate" in torture and took seriously all allegations of torture.

The attorney general, Lady Scotland was already examining allegations of "criminal wrongdoing" by MI5 and the CIA, he said.

In their ruling, the judges said that the secret documents "gave rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" and they said that British intelligence officials were present when Binyam was allegedly tortured.

The ruling was the latest from a long-running and unprecedented series of court hearings into the abduction of Binjam, who was seized in Pakistan in 2002 and secretly rendered to Morocco, where he says he was tortured, before being sent to Guantanamo via Afghanistan.

Last year the judges ruled that the British government had an obligation to hand over evidence in its possession relating to his rendition and alleged torture.