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.

Craig Murray writes.

At 2pm today Alisher Khakimjanov faces a fast track asylum hearing and possible immediate deportation to Uzbekistan. Alisher's father was arrested by police following the Andijan massacre by Uzbek troops of anti-regime demonstrators. The family's home was confiscated by the State and militia have been looking for Alisher, who was a student in the UK.

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.

Guardian report.

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.

Times report.

For the past 10 weeks a senior lawyer in the office of Baroness Scotland, the attorney-general, has been studying the cases of five British men alleged to have been unlawfully detained and tortured in Pakistan with the complicity of MI5.

Scotland may rule there is insufficient evidence to call in detectives but if she does refer the cases to the police, it could in effect paralyse the agency that Evans has led since 2007.

Guardian report.

The Metropolitan police is investigating allegations that MI5 was complicit in the torture of Shaker Aamer, the last remaining British resident in Guantánamo Bay, it was revealed today.

Investigating officers have applied to the high court for the release of classified government documents relating to the case. They are already investigating claims of MI5 complicity in the ill-treatment of British resident Binyam Mohamed while being held by the US.

Craig Murray comments on Bruce Anderson's nasty piece that was in the Independent on Monday.

Saloon bar bigot Bruce Anderson came out with a fierce defence of the government's use of torture. It could have been written by Torquemada, Walsingham or Franco. To get that vital information about the ticking bomb, it would be morally imperative to torture the terrorist's wife and children, he concluded.

Interesting is it not that to opine that Palestinian suicide bombers are justified is illegal, but to advocate torture of innocent women and children is patriotic?

From the Guardian.

A growing number of young British Muslims say they have been tortured overseas with the apparent complicity of MI5 or MI6 officers. Not all are still considered terrorism suspects -- many were released without charge -- but the intelligence and security committee has never sought to interview any of them, or their lawyers.

Conor Gearty on the London Review of Books blog.

What a change we have seen! Binyam Mohamed's case was before the three most senior judges in the land outside the Supreme Court. None of the three is anything other than mainstream: their views can be taken reliably to reflect the atmosphere that prevails in the rarefied judicial world in which they spend their professional lives. Their decision upholds the principle of open justice as against the interests of the intelligence service and requires that the full basis for Binyam Mohamed's victory in the lower court is made clear to him.

Guardian report.

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.

Andrew Sullivan in the Atlantic points out that Cheney has just confessed that he is a war criminal.

That seems to me to be the big news out of Jonathan Karl's interview with the former vice-president today. There is not a court in the United States or in the world that does not consider waterboarding torture. The Red Cross certainly does, and it's the governing body in international law. It is certainly torture according to the UN Convention on Torture and the Geneva Conventions. The British government, America's closest Western ally, certainly believes it is torture. No legal authority of any type in the US or the world has ever doubted that waterboarding is torture. To have subjected an individual to waterboarding once is torture under US and international law. To subject someone to it 183 times is so categorically torture is it almost absurd to even write this sentence.

Richard Ingrams in the Independent.

When in doubt, shout conspiracy

It is always fair to assume that when people start referring to their opponents as conspiracy theorists they are on weak ground.

Tony Blair was doing it the other day when he dismissed critics of his Iraq policy in an interview on American TV. Sir Lawrence Freedman, a member of the Chilcot inquiry team, likewise has accused those of us who draw attention to the links between Israel and the American neocons as conspiratorial -- the irony being that those neocons have never made any attempt to conceal their loyalties. Now the head of MI5, Jonathan Evans, has referred in public to a "conspiracy theory" being advanced by Court of Appeal judges who have attacked MI5 for concealing their knowledge of what went on at Guantanamo.