This is disgusting. How dare these colonial upstarts make threats against us?
Worse, so much for Obama’s much vaunted stand against torture. To threaten to cancel intelligence sharing if proof of torture was made public is despicable.
Worse, the US is derailing Britain’s own attempt to make public an investigation into whether British Intelligence knew about torture.
To interfere in another country’s investigation into whether its own agencies broke its own laws is, simply, low.
It really seems that the 13 colonies lost their sense of civility in 1776 when they turned traitor to their mother nation.
Evidence of how a British resident held in the Guantánamo Bay detention camp was tortured, and what MI5 knew about it, must remain secret because of serious threats the US has made against the UK, the high court ruled today.
The judges made clear they were deeply unhappy with their decision, but said they had no alternative as a result of a statement by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, that if the evidence was disclosed the US would stop sharing intelligence with Britain. That would directly threaten the UK’s national security, Miliband had told the court.
This afternoon David Davis, the Conservative MP and former shadow home secretary, said ministers must urgently respond to the allegations that Britain was complicit in torture. He demanded a Commons statement from the government on the ruling, calling it “a matter of utmost national importance”.
Davis said: "The ruling implies that torture has taken place in the [Binyam] Mohamed case, that British agencies may have been complicit, and further, that the United States government has threatened our high court that if it releases this information the US government will withdraw its intelligence cooperation with the United Kingdom.
“The judge rules that there is a strong public interest that this information is put in the public domain even though it is politically embarrassing.”
He told the BBC: “The government is going to have to do some pretty careful explaining about what’s going on.”
The ruling, by Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones, was the latest from a long-running and unprecedented series of court hearings into the abduction of Binyam Mohamed, who was seized and held incommunicado in Pakistan in 2002 before being secretly rendered to Morocco, where he says he was tortured.
He was subsequently flown to Afghanistan before being rendered to Guantánamo Bay.
Today’s ruling comes after the judges last year invited the Guardian and other media groups to question earlier claims by Miliband that the disclosure of evidence, originally contained in documents given to him by the US government, would threaten the UK’s national security.