Page 4, 3 , 2 , 1

How many more times will they change the story on torture?

Six years ago, I started to ask questions about rendition and got no proper answers. I have since made specific allegations: that the UK has facilitated rendition; that Diego Garcia was used for this purpose; that UK armed forces were dragged into rendition. All were met with blanket denials. The then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, likened such allegations to "conspiracy theories". Each has now been admitted.The High Court had already found that the UK's role in the rendition 2of Mohamed "was far beyond that of a bystander or witness to the alleged wrongdoing", and that the UK had "facilitated" his interrogation by the US. In last week's judgement, the Master of the Rolls was critical of the officer who interrogated Mohamed, known as Witness B, whose involvement was "dubious" and who was less than "frank" about his involvement.

How M15 Kept Watchdog In The Dark Over Torture

It was in the middle of 2008 that Jonathan Evans, director general of MI5, delivered a bombshell confession to the previously compliant parliamentarians of the intelligence and security committee He told them, in strict secrecy as usual, that assurances of MI5 innocence previously accepted without demur by the politicians had in fact been false. That report, based on testimony from Eliza Manningham-Buller, Evans's predecessor, informed the world that MI5 had been unaware of any ill-treatment dished out by its US allies to Binyam Mohamed. The opposite was true. As the appeal court has now finally revealed, detailed briefings had been supplied at the time by Washington on the CIA's "new strategy" for softening up Mohamed and others, for which it demanded British help.

Evidence of Britains Torture Role Piles up

The government is currently embroiled in a number of legal actions and has suffered a string of humiliating defeats in the courts in recent months.Despite seemingly incontrovertible evidence of British complicity in the tortue of Mr Mohamed, Mr Aamer and others and a damning criticism of the behaviour of the intelligence services by one of the country's most senior judges this month, both the government and MI5 continue to deny any wrongdoing. The allegations have added to the intense pressure on the government to establish a full public inquiry into the state's role in the kidnap and torture of its own citizens and residents. An influential committee of MPs called this weekend for the publication of the government's guidance to the security services on interrogation practices and also demanded a public investigation into the allegations of torture.

Publish The UK Torture Rules

We shouldn't have to resort to the courts to find out if the UK has been complicit in torture of prisoners in the 'war on terror' All too often, in the torture chambers of the "war on terror", a prisoner's most desperate moment came when he discovered that the questions his torturers put to him came not merely from Pakistan or Morocco or even the US, but from his home country – the UK. Reprieve is back in court this week, demanding that the court investigate secret UK policies that might have allowed this – and worse – to happen. If our suspicions are correct, the court will find that government guidelines were unlawful, because they enabled systematic complicity in torture.Reprieve's case is that increasingly compelling evidence suggests the rules up to now have not prevented UK complicity in torture. In fact, Reprieve believes a strong case can be made to show that UK intelligence services have systemically been providing information and questions, and conducting interviews with detainees held in foreign custody.

" British Intelligence were there at every stage of my detention"

I am a British citizen and the British intelligence services were, as far as I'm concerned, complicit in the torture of their own citizens – the ones they're supposed to protect. I think that although the government is caught between trying to justify it and trying to deny it, this revelation should cause things to change more than they ever have before. But I don't know if that will be the case. There's been a strong denial from the government and suggestions from them that it's a slur. That's impossible. It's a statement of fact. The government is trying to hide this under the interests of national security. I remember very well when I was held – not just in Guantánamo, but also in Bagram and Kandahar – that British intelligence services were present at every leg of that journey. I knew one of them from the UK because he'd ­visited my house in Birmingham, so we already knew each other when I saw him again at Kandahar and Bagram.

Evidence of Britains Torture Role Piles Up

Equality and Human Rights Commission chairman Trevor Phillips said: "Ministers and government agencies are facing very serious allegations of knowing that UK citizens were being tortured, failing to take action to stop that torture and supplying questions to be used in the interrogation of men who were subjected to a high level of ill-treatment. "Given the UK's role as a world leader on human rights, it would be inexplicable for the government not to urgently put in place an independent review process to assess the truth, or otherwise, of these allegations." An influential committee of MPs called this weekend for the publication of the government's guidance to the security services on interrogation practices and also demanded a public investigation into the allegations of torture. On Friday, the Metropolitan Police formally approached the courts to request secret documents relating to the alleged complicity of MI5 in the torture of British resident Shaker Aamer.

Poland Admits Role In CIA Rendition Programme

The Polish authorities have for the first time admitted their involvement in the CIA's secret programme for the rendition of high-level terrorist suspects from Iraq and Afghanistan, it emerged today. After years of stonewalling, Warsaw's air control service confirmed that at least six CIA flights had landed at a disused military air base in northern Poland in 2003. "It is time for the authorities to provide a full accounting of Poland's role in rendition," Adam Bodnar, of the Warsaw-based Helsinki Foundation for Human Rights, said. "These flight records reinforce the troubling findings of official European inquiries and global human rights groups, showing complicity with CIA abuse across Europe." For years, European and human rights investigators have believed Poland played a key role in the secret renditions programme, which became a human rights scandal for the George Bush administration.

It`s not Just The E-Mails DOJ Lost - Its the Back-up Documentation

We’ve been talking quite a bit about John Yoo and Patrick Philbin’s emails on the torture memos that OLC deleted: with a rebuttal of John Yoo’s claims there were no email, a report on the National Archives’ attempts to learn what happened, and a catalog of damning facts we learned from the few emails left over. For long periods OPR had the documents, lumped in with a bunch of other torture documents, so it could work on is investigation; the documents got shuttled around for other purposes, as well,including other investigations and one trip to the CIA for a 2007 update to the FOIA Vaughn Index. And, somewhere along the way, at least 10 documents originally identified in 2005 as responsive to the FOIA got lost.