03.15.10
British inquiry into torture references ricin case
“What and when MI5 knew about torture” is the headline of a story in the Guardian here.
The introduction reads:
Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5 throughout most of the years of the so-called war on terror, insisted yesterday she had not known that Khalid Shiekh Mohammed was being waterboarded.
In a response to the appeal court’s judgment that MI5 officers had a “dubious record” on torture, she sought to blame the US and maintained that only after she retired in 2007 did she discover that the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks had been waterboarded 160 times. “The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,” she said. Critics, though, said it was stretching credulity to claim surprise.
However, British intelligence and anti-terrorism police regarded information extracted under torture as worthy of consideration, no matter the source or procedures used to extract it.
This pertained to the the infamous London ricin trial in which the government’s chief informant was an Algerian named Muhammad Meguerba.
When this writer was contacted by the UK defense for the accused Algerians in the “ricin case” in 2004 — a group that had been dubbed an infamous “UK poison cell” linking al Qaeda in Iraq with the west by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his infamous speech to the UN — most of the UK government’s case was said to rest on the information provided by Meguerba.
However, as time went on, Meguerba’s material could not be brought as evidence. And this was said to be because it had been made in a confession extracted under torture while in Algeria, a confession that was later recanted.
A London jury eventually concluded there had been no UK poison ring, just one loner with wild plans — Kamel Bourgass, a very bad man who had been convicted in a previous trial of murdering a Manchester police office during his capture.
The Guardian piece continued:
Eliza Manningham-Buller spelt out her position in written evidence to the law lords in 2005: “In some cases, it may be apparent to the [security and intelligence] agencies that the intelligence has been obtained from individuals in detention … though even then the agencies will often not know the location of details of detention,” she said.
Though she added that detainees could “seek to mislead their questioners”, she said: “Experience proves that detainee reporting can be accurate and may enable lives to be saved.”
She referred in her statement to the “ricin trial” and the Algerian supergrass in the case, Muhammad Meguerba. “Questioning of Algerian liaison [security service] about their methods of questioning detainees would almost certainly have been rebuffed and at the same time would have damaged the relationship to the detriment of our ability to counter international terrorism,” Manningham-Buller said.
Lord Bingham, the senior law lord, said in the ruling that intelligence extracted by torture was not admissible in British courts: “I am not impressed by the argument based on the practical undesirability of upsetting foreign regimes which may resort to torture.”