Angry U.S. warns there will be a price for Britain to pay after judges reveal MI5 DID collude in abuse of terror suspects

The U.S. has warned its relationship with Britain has been harmed by the court ruling that revealed Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed was tortured at the behest of American authorities.

The White House expressed dismay after the Government lost its bid to suppress the documents which showed MI5 knew about the treatment of Mohamed.



It declared that it was 'deeply disappointed' by the ruling and warned it would make intelligence sharing with Britain more difficult.

Spokesman Ben LaBolt said: 'We shared this information in confidence and with certain expectations. As we warned, the court's judgment will complicate the confidentiality of our intelligence-sharing relationship with the UK, and it will have to factor into our decision-making going forward.'

'Torture files': Binyam Mohamed and Foreign Secretary David Miliband

In Washington, a statement by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, said the ruling was 'not helpful'.



It said: 'The protection of confidential information is essential to strong, effective security and intelligence cooperation among allies.



'The decision by a United Kingdom court to release classified information provided by the US is not helpful, and we deeply regret it.'

On a day of high drama yesterday, it emerged the Government had tried to suppress a senior judge's verdict that Britain colluded in torture.

The Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, effectively accused MI5 of complicity in torture and having a culture of disregarding human rights.



The explosive disclosure was a serious blow to Foreign Secretary David Miliband on a day of high drama.

It began when the Foreign Office was yesterday forced to publish evidence which he had battled to suppress through the courts, showing that MI5 knew the British Guantanamo Bay detainee Binyam Mohamed had been tortured at the behest of the U.S. authorities.





MPs said that the revelations had left a 'stain' on Britain's reputation in the world.



The country's three most senior judges rejected an attempt by Mr Miliband to stop publication of seven paragraphs of intelligence supplied to the British authorities by the CIA.



These detailed evidence of MI5's knowledge that Mohamed had been tortured after he was detained in Pakistan in 2002.

Foreign Office lawyer Jonathan Sumption QC

T he Appeal Court judges flatly rejected Mr Miliband's claim that releasing the material - which they said showed Mohamed had suffered 'cruel, inhuman and degrading' treatment - would damage relations with the U.S.

But within hours of the bombshell verdict being delivered, it emerged that one of the judges, Lord Neuberger, had gone even further in his original draft of the judgment.

After being handed a copy earlier this week, the QC for Mr Miliband, Jonathan Sumption, wrote to the court demanding that the judge's verdict should not be included as MI5 had not had the opportunity to respond to the allegations.



The paragraph - known as 168 - was duly removed. But it leaked into the public domain yesterday afternoon when Mr Sumption's letter to the judges was inadvertently made available to the court.

The letter detailed how Lord Neuberger had made observations about the previous 'form' of MI5. Mr Sumption complained that these remarks would 'receive more public attention than any other parts of the judgment'.



They included a finding that MI5 did not respect human rights or renounce 'coercive interrogation techniques'.



The letter also shows that the judge originally ruled MI5 officers had 'deliberately misled' a Parliamentary inquiry into the torture allegations which have dogged the security services and Government in recent years.



The security services were accused of having a ' culture of suppression', Mr Sumption's letter said.

It was also revealed that the letter had been sent to Lord Neuberger at 6pm on Monday, two hours after the deadline for submissions and corrections.

Lawyers for the other side did not receive a copy of the letter until 11am the next morning, preventing them from challenging the proposed changes.

Refusal: Appeal Court judges Lord Chief Justice Lord Judge, right and Master of the Rolls Lord Neuberger, left



Mr Miliband has always insisted the UK does not condone or participate in torture. This is despite a number of terror suspects, including Mohamed, claiming brutal treatment.



Former shadow home secretary David Davis said of Mr Miliband's attempts to suppress the judge's remarks: 'What this shows is that the Foreign Secretary is still trying to perpetrate a cover-up of improper behaviour by Government agencies in collusion with torture. We need to know how it happened and how far up it went.'

The Foreign Secretary yesterday refused to answer questions about whether more cases of alleged British collusion in torture are being considered.



But government sources said that about 15 cases were under consideration. One MI5 officer, known only as Witness B, who questioned Mohamed, is under investigation by Scotland Yard over alleged collusion.

Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, said: 'The paragraphs revealed are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to British complicity in torture - much more is to come.

'The judges have shown that our government's attempts to hide shameful secrets behind "national security" arguments are misguided and doomed to fail.'

Amid demands for a full public inquiry, legal experts said it was astonishing that the Foreign Office had sought to water down the judge's ruling.



Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said: 'I have never known the draft judgment process abused in this way. It shows the kind of contempt for the law this case has always been about.'

Lord Neuberger said he might have been 'over-hasty' in removing the findings and gave other parties involved in the case - including Mohamed's lawyers - until tomorrow to argue why paragraph 168 should be reinstated.

Mr Miliband, forced to make a statement in the Commons after the verdict, defended the attempt to have the paragraph removed.

He said: 'What our counsel did was to express real concern that one paragraph set out conclusions that went beyond the evidence concluded and risked causing prejudice to a criminal investigation.'

Mr Miliband said he had spoken with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the case, which was being 'followed carefully at the highest levels in the U.S. system with a great deal of concern'.

Whitehall sources insisted it had been right to fight the case, not to cover up the information but to safeguard the principle that intelligence information shared between allied countries must be kept confidential at all costs.

Senior Labour backbencher David Winnick said the suggestion of complicity in torture left a 'stain' on Britain's reputation.

'While ministers - perhaps in all sincerity, we do not know - were saying that we do not condone torture in any way, torture was taking place and we as a country closed our eyes to it.'

Even without the revelation that he had tried to suppress part of the verdict, yesterday's ruling was a hammer blow to Mr Miliband.

The Appeal judges upheld a High Court decision last year that the seven-paragraph summary of information held by the British security services about Mohamed's treatment should be published.

They said the case raised issues of 'fundamental importance' of 'democratic accountability and ultimately the rule of law itself'.

Mr Miliband faces huge questions about whether the security services were happy to benefit from information obtained through torture or - crucially - informed ministers it was happening.



Ministers have refused to publish the rules governing MI5 at the time, or say what their obligations were to ensure suspects were not tortured.

Medieval barbarity of the torture squad

By any measure, the treatment meted out to Binyam Mohamed was medieval in its barbarity.

Shackled in total blackness in the CIA's 'dark prison' in Kabul, he was forced to listen to ear-splitting music 24 hours a day for a month.

In Morocco he was hung from walls and ceilings and repeatedly beaten, His penis and chest were sliced with a scalpel and hot, stinging liquid poured into the open wounds.

Binyam Mohamed seen arriving back in Britain in February 2009

'They cut all over my private parts,' he wrote in his diary. 'One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists.'

Ethiopian-born Mohamed, now 31, arrived in London in 1994 as a schoolboy seeking asylum. He was refused refugee status but granted exceptional leave to remain in 2000.

He studied electrical and electronic engineering and got a job as a caretaker. He also converted to Islam and attended a mosque frequented by radical Muslims.

In 2001 he went to Afghanistan. He said he had experimented with drugs, heroin and crack cocaine, and went there to get away from a 'bad crowd', kick the habit and see if the Taliban had produced a good Muslim country.

The U.S. alleged that he received paramilitary training at an Al Qaeda training camp, fought for the Taliban and plotted to detonate a radioactive 'dirty bomb' in America.

It claimed he was cherry-picked by Al Qaeda because of his UK residency, and received firearms and explosives training alongside British shoe bomber Richard Reid.

Mohamed denies all the allegations and says that he confessed to anything his torturers wanted him to say.

In April 2002 he was arrested at Karachi as he tried to board a London-bound flight. His photograph had been inserted into another man's genuine British passport.



During his detention in Pakistan, he said, he was questioned by an MI5 officer who called himself John.

Mohamed said the officer knew he had already been tortured numerous times after his capture.

In July 2002 Mohamed was flown - trussed, gagged, blindfolded and wearing a giant nappy - from Islamabad to Rabat in Morocco.

For the next 18 months he suffered torture including the genital mutilation. He says it was here that questions from MI5 were channelled by his Moroccan interrogators. 'It was obvious the British were feeding them questions about people in London.'

Mohamed says that under torture he told his interrogators that 9/11 planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had given him the false British passport and that he had met Osama Bin Laden 30 times. 'None of it was true.'

In January 2004 Mohamed was ' rendered' by the CIA to Afghanistan and the infamous 'dark prison' where he said he came closest to losing his mind.'

He arrived in September at Guantanamo, and the next year was charged with conspiracy to plan terror attacks but all charges were dropped in 2008. Mohamed was allowed to fly to Britain last February.