BRITISH FOREIGN secretary David Miliband has said he will not “join a lobbying campaign” to persuade the Obama administration to permit public disclosure of intelligence material relating to the alleged torture of a former British resident in Guantánamo Bay.
In a statement to MPs about the case of Binyam Mohammed, an Ethiopian national resident in the UK before his arrest in Pakistan in 2002, Mr Miliband insisted public disclosure must be for American decision alone – and that publication against the wishes of the US authorities “would cause real and significant damage to the national security and international relations” of the United Kingdom.
At the same time Mr Miliband told MPs there was “no prejudice” to Mr Mohammed’s case as a result of a High Court judgment on Wednesday as the information in question had been made available to his US legal counsel.
In an attack on the US authorities, two judges, one a law lord, claimed the US had threatened to stop or reduce intelligence-sharing arrangements with the UK if it made public details of Mr Mohammed’s alleged ill-treatment.
Mr Miliband insisted: “The United States authorities did not threaten to ‘break off’ intelligence co-operation with the UK. What the United States said, and it appears in the open, public documents of this case, is that disclosure of these documents by order of our courts would be ‘likely to result in serious damage to US national security and could harm existing intelligence information-sharing between our two governments’.”
Maintaining “a fundamental distinction” between justice for individuals and public interest, Mr Miliband also told MPs that Wednesday’s judgment was not about allegations that British agencies had been “complicit” in Mr Mohammed’s alleged torture.
Following an earlier judgment last October, home secretary Jacqui Smith had already referred the question of “possible criminal wrongdoing” to the attorney general. Wednesday’s judgment “was not about that”, Mr Miliband said.
“It was about whether an English court should, in the interests of public debate and understanding, order the disclosure to the general public of sensitive foreign intelligence shared with our own intelligence agencies on the strict understanding that it would not be released.”
Mr Miliband quoted the clear and unanimous advice of all key UK departments and agencies: “Intelligence is shared on the basis of a reciprocal understanding that the confidence in and control over it will always be retained by the State that provides it.”
He added that the principle would remain the same in a case that “could just as easily” involve British intelligence in a foreign court.
