Guardian report.

David Cameron told the Commons that the government will next year "publish a green paper which will set out our initial proposals for how intelligence is treated in the full range of judicial proceedings, including addressing the concerns of our allies". The government is seeking legislation that would in future prevent judges releasing information passed to MI5 by the CIA, as they did in the Binyam Mohamed case.

Independent report.

In a letter copied to the Prime Minister, Reprieve has requested that Sir Peter Gibson step aside as his impartiality is fatally compromised.

As the Intelligence Services Commissioner (ISC), it has been Sir Peter's job for more than four years to oversee the Security Services; he cannot now be the judge whether his own work was effective.

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.

Independent report. All the headlines will be devoted to Abu Hamza: most people will remain unaware of Babar Ahmad and the terrible injustice that has been done to him.

Human rights judges today ordered a halt to the extraditions of Babar Ahmad and radical preacher Abu Hamza, both wanted in the US on terror charges.

Independent report.

Babar Ahmad, 35, is the longest-serving prisoner held without charge or trial in the UK. In his first media interview since his arrest on a US extradition warrant in 2004, Mr Ahmad tells Robert Verkaik that he is the forgotten victim of the 'war on terror'. In March 2009, he was awarded £60,000 in compensation after an admission by the UK's anti-terrorist police that they subjected him to 'grave abuse, tantamount to torture' during his first arrest in December 2003. Corresponding via email from a secure isolation unit at Long Lartin prison, he calls on the Government to charge him or release him. Today, the European Court of Human Rights rules on his case.

Craig Murray writes.

An FCO source warns me this morning that a vicious rearguard action is being fought within the FCO, to ensure that any government inquiry excludes my evidence and does not consider whether there was a policy of complicity with torture. Rather the security services wish it only to look at individual cases like Binyam Mohammed and assess compensation for them. The cover-up that these individual cases were accidents would be maintained.

BBC report.

A judge-led inquiry is to be held into claims British security services were complicit in the torture of terror suspects, the BBC understands.

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.

Scott Horton in Harper's.

It's clear that the Labour government was engaged in the same sort of dissembling about torture that marked the Bush Administration, using wiggle words with secret meanings. If the truth is now to emerge, it serves the public interest in Britain, just as it would serve the U.S. public interest, for it to emerge from a detached and depoliticized process--so the formal judicial inquiry is the appropriate tool, just as a commission of inquiry would be for the United States.

[...]

At this point, no issue is more fundamental to the civil liberties agenda. The Obama Administration should watch and learn a bit about how a modern democracy approaches the question of accountability for torture.

Guardian report.

The general in charge of British operations in Iraq has said he was "absolutely horrified" by the number of injuries sustained by Baha Mousa, the Basra hotel worker who died in the custody of British soldiers in September 2003.

From Middle East Online.

Rice's record as National Security Advisor is devastatingly attacked by CIA Director George Tenet and Counter-Terrorism chief Richard Clarke. They reveal how she ignored scores of warnings in the spring and summer of 2001 that an Al Qaeda attack was imminent.

[...]

Richard Clarke, chief counter-terrorism adviser between 1992-2003 concurred: "Rice decided what torture to use on what person."

"American Faust" reveals that the techniques that Rice approved went far beyond the mock executions and water-boarding already made public. Our film has first-hand accounts of torture techniques that make stress positions look like a slap on the wrist.

Craig Murray comments.

Even worse news. Cameron's much vaunted National Security Council will be headed by the FCO's pro-torture Peter Ricketts, who is personally up to his ears in the policy of complicity in torture, and in its continued cover-up - including being personally involved in the censorship of this vital FOI release last week.

BBC report.

The US airbase at Bagram in Afghanistan contains a facility for detainees that is distinct from its main prison, the Red Cross has confirmed to the BBC.

[...]

The US military says the main prison, now called the Detention Facility in Parwan, is the only detention facility on the base.

Craig Murray writes.

I have now obtained under the Freedom of Information Act a heavily censored copy of one of my telegrams from Tashkent protesting at the use by the UK government of intelligence obtained under torture.

Every British person should read this telegram and hang their head in the deepest of shame. This is the pitch blackness of New Labour's embrace of authoritarianism. Read it, and remember I was both smeared and sacked for this attempt to apply simply the most basic of humane standards.

Independent report.

A secret Iraqi government prison, where detainees were subjected to horrific abuse and at least one died from his injuries, was described yesterday as being "worse than Abu Ghraib".

Its prisoners, who were mainly Sunni Arabs, included a wheelchair-bound British national. Freed captives told the New York-based organisation Human Rights Watch that they were raped, tortured with electric shocks and suffocated.

From Human Rights Watch.

Detainees in a secret Baghdad detention facility were hung upside-down, deprived of air, kicked, whipped, beaten, given electric shocks, and sodomized, Human Rights Watch said today. Iraq should thoroughly investigate and prosecute all government and security officials responsible, Human Rights Watch said.