Guardian report.

The true extent of the Labour government's involvement in the illegal abduction and torture of its own citizens after the al-Qaida attacks of September 2001 has been spelled out in stark detail with the disclosure during high court proceedings of a mass of highly classified documents.

Guardian report.

Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP who established the Commons All-Party Parliamentary Group on Extraordinary Rendition, said: "I am appalled but not entirely surprised by the extent of British involvement in extraordinary rendition which these documents appear to reveal. I was extremely concerned to read the telegram [giving the go-ahead for removing those detained in Afghanistan to Guantánamo] attributed to Jack Straw. If it is from him, it reveals that as foreign secretary in 2002 he stated that the transfer of UK detainees to Guantánamo Bay was the 'best way' and should take place 'as soon as possible' after the detainees had been interviewed by a British team."

"Yet Jack Straw subsequently claimed that he had no knowledge of any British involvement in rendition. Worse, he dismissed the concerns of those of us who had raised this issue over many years as 'conspiracy theories'. "I hope there is a good explanation. In the absence of one, for a Foreign Secretary to have issued such denials, after having apparently endorsed the rendition of UK detainees three years earlier, would further erode the public's trust in politics. That has already been badly damaged by the Iraq war."

Andy Worthington writes.

President Obama's hopes of closing Guantánamo, which were already gravely wounded by his inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of a year for the prison's closure, now appear to have been killed off by lawmakers in Congress.

Telegraph report.

The former CIA chief, Porter Goss, approved a 2005 decision to destroy 92 tapes showing US agents waterboarding two terrorism suspects, according to newly released internal emails.

[...]

"These documents provide further evidence that senior CIA officials were willing to risk being prosecuted for obstruction of justice in order to avoid being prosecuted for torture," said Ben Wizner, a lawyer with the ACLU. "If the Department of Justice fails to hold these officials accountable, they will have succeeded in their cover-up."

Andy Worthington writes.

Those of us who have been studying the recent career of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson were not surprised when, last week, he submitted a declaration (PDF) in a lawsuit seeking compensation from the US government that was filed by former Guantánamo prisoner Adel Hassan Hamad. A Sudanese hospital worker, Hamad was sold to US forces by their unscrupulous Pakistani allies in the summer of 2002, but was only released from Guantánamo in December 2007.

In the declaration, Col. Wilkerson, who served in the US military for 31 years and was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from August 2002 until January 2005, stated that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld all knew -- and didn't care -- that "the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent."

Last March, Col. Wilkerson wrote a guest column for The Washington Note, "Some Truths About Guantánamo Bay," in which he first laid out some of his major complaints about the failures of the Bush administration's detention policies in the "War on Terror." In his column, Col. Wilkerson decried "the utter incompetence of the battlefield vetting in Afghanistan during the early stages of the US operations there," and explained, "Simply stated, no meaningful attempt at discrimination was made in-country by competent officials, civilian or military, as to who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation."

Andrew Sullivan on his Atlantic blog.

Lie after lie after lie. And the illegal imprisonment and torture of individuals often completely unrelated to terrorism at all. And no accountability. This was America for almost eight years. And Obama has perpetuated the avoidance of responsibility with staggering diligence.

Times report.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld covered up that hundreds of innocent men were sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp because they feared that releasing them would harm the push for war in Iraq and the broader War on Terror, according to a new document obtained by The Times.

The accusations were made by Lawrence Wilkerson, a top aide to Colin Powell, the former Republican Secretary of State, in a signed declaration to support a lawsuit filed by a Guantánamo detainee. It is the first time that such allegations have been made by a senior member of the Bush Administration.

Craig Murray comments.

There is a good article in the Guardian by Vikram Dodd on Eliza Manningham Buller's professed ignorance. Some kind people in the comments thread have pointed out that my testimony and documentary evidence directly contradicts Manningham Buller.

Vikram Dodd in the Guardian.

The claim on Wednesday from the former head of MI5, Eliza Manningham-Buller, that the US hid from the UK security services the torture they were meting out to the Muslim men they had labelled terrorists, comes as a bit of surprise.

[...]

Before her retirement in 2007, then, all that Manningham-Buller needed to have been doing was read a decent newspaper or use a web search, either of which would have produced headlines and articles that would have pricked the curiosity of even the dullest of minds. Never mind those who see themselves as among the sharpest and brightest.

Craig Murray writes. The Independent article reporting Eliza Manningham-Buller's lecture is here.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5, is engaged in an outrageous attempt to rewrite history, by claiming we were unaware that the CIA was getting intelligence from torture.

[...] was told that, as a matter of policy in the War on Terror, we were using intelligence from torture. Sir Michael Wood said at the meeting that in his opinion this policy was not contrary to international law.

Guardian report.

The government will attempt today to have a case about torture heard entirely behind closed doors in a move that some lawyers say would extend secrecy to a new area of hearings, overriding ancient principles of English law.

[...]

"This would set a very serious precedent," said Louise Christian, a partner at Christian Khan who represents Martin Mubanga, one of the claimants, who was also detained at Guantánamo Bay. "If you allow evidence in ordinary civil cases to be kept secret, there is no doubt it will be endlessly used by the government. As the Binyam Mohamed case illustrated, this is really about the government avoiding embarrassment for the reality of their collaboration with the US and all that happened, rather than any real national security issues."

Clive Stafford Smith in the Guardian.

After rubbing the government's nose in its torture cover-up in the case of Binyam Mohamed, we gave the government a chance to come clean this week in the case of Mohammed Saad Iqbal Madni, a man I met last week in Lahore, Pakistan. Madni was rendered through Diego Garcia to 92 days of particularly gruesome torture in Egypt, followed by time in Bagram and Guantánamo, before being belatedly cleared of any crime and sent home.

The British, sad to say, were again mixed up in all this. We suggested last August that they simply admit it.

[...]

A hearing was set for the case on 4 March 2010. At 5:21pm on 3 March, after the close of business, the government changed its tune. The government now admitted to the court that it was in "possession of documents which have a bearing … on whether any British or American authorities were mixed up in wrongdoing …"

Independent report.

He was supposed to return to Britain in 2007 -- but Shaker Aamer is still being held inside Camp Delta. Who is this charismatic prisoner? And what happened to him at the hands of MI5? Robert Verkaik reports

Larisa Alexandrovna on at-Largely.

The reason Liz Cheney is so interested in demonizing lawyers who represented or advocated for detainees at Gitmo is because her father has admitted to committing war crimes, over and over and over. Using the same old handbook, Liz Cheney is defending daddy by demonizing anyone in a position to shed light on the war crimes committed on her father's orders.

Channel 4 report.

The "special relationship" is showing strain as a meeting set to celebrate UK and US intelligence sharing is called off in the wake of the decision to publish information about Binyam Mohamed.

A meeting to celebrate 60 years of UK/US defence intelligence sharing was called off last week, Channel 4 News has learned, in the wake of the controversial Court of Appeal ruling in the Binyam Mohamed case.

Andy Worthington writes.

On Friday, it emerged in a UK court that the Metropolitan Police is investigating allegations that MI5 was complicit in the torture, in US custody in Afghanistan, of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident still held at Guantánamo. In the High Court, Richard Hermer QC, counsel for Aamer, told Mr. Justice Sullivan that Met officers had visited his solicitors, Birnberg Peirce, on Wednesday. "It became apparent they are now investigating allegations raised by Mr. Aamer into the alleged complicity of the UK security service in his mistreatment," he said, adding that the police had made an application to the court "for release of relevant documents" relating to Aamer's allegations that the confessions he made in US custody were obtained through torture.