BRITISH FOREIGN secretary David Miliband was under pressure last night to make an urgent Commons statement on allegations that British authorities were complicit in the torture of a British resident held at Guantánamo Bay.
The demand came from senior Conservative MP David Davis after an extraordinary attack on the US authorities by two judges, one a Law Lord, who said the US had threatened to reduce intelligence sharing with the UK if “allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment” were made public.
Mr Davis called for a statement on “a matter of utmost national importance” shortly after the publication of the judgment implying that terror suspect Binyan Mohammed had been tortured and that British agencies may have been complicit.
The two judges decided against releasing evidence requested by Mr Mohammed’s lawyers because the threatened withdrawal of intelligence access would not be in the national interest and would put the public at risk.
Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said: “It was in our view difficult to conceive that a democratically-elected and accountable government could possibly have any rational objection to placing into the public domain such a summary of what its own officials reported, as to how a detainee was treated by them and which made no disclosure of sensitive intelligence.”
They went on: “We had no reason . . . to anticipate there would be a threat of the gravity of the kind made by the United States government that it would reconsider its intelligence-sharing relationship, when all the considerations [of] open justice pointed to us providing a limited but important summary of the reports.”
The judges appealed to the Obama administration to reconsider the American position.