Posts tagged UK security and terrorism

Timeline of what the former MI5 chief Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller and her colleagues knew

Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the head of MI5 throughout most of the years of the so-called war on terror, insisted yesterday that 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 the former head of the security service was stretching credulity by claiming the matter had come as such a surprise.

10 January 2002 An MI6 officer, carrying out one of the first British interrogations in Afghanistan after 9/11, reports back to London that the individual was mistreated by Americans before the questioning began. The incident is reported by the Intelligence and Security committee (ISC) , the group of MPs and peers that is supposed to provide oversight of MI5 and MI6.

11 January 2002 Every MI6 and MI5 officer in Afghanistan is issued with legal advice stating that they are under no obligation to intervene to prevent torture, as long as the victim is not in UK “custody or control”, but that British intelligence officers “cannot be party to such ill treatment nor can we be seen to condone it”. Critics of MI5 say this advice failed to meet its obligations under international law, and was subsequently used to facilitate torture. Later in the month, the Pentagon releases pictures taken by US navy photographers, showing hooded and shackled detainees being dragged across the ground at the newly opened detention centre at Guantánamo Bay.

April 2002 The CIA hands MI5 more than 50 classified documents that detail the mistreatment of Binyam Mohamed, a British resident detained at Karachi airport in Pakistan on 10 April. A judicial summary of those documents – released by the court of appeal last month after an 18-month battle by the government to conceal it from the public – shows that MI5 knew Mohamed was being “continuously deprived of sleep”, threatened with being “disappeared”, and that this was “having a marked effect upon him and causing him significant mental stress and suffering”.

Manningham-Buller was deputy director general of MI5 at the time the agency received these CIA documents. Having learned the details of Mohamed’s mistreatment, MI5 sends one of its officers, a man known as Witness B, to Karachi to question Mohamed. The high court later concludes: “The probability is that Witness B read the reports either before he left for Karachi or before he conducted the interview … a briefing document was prepared for sending to him.” Witness B is now the subject of a Scotland Yard investigation.

September 2002 MI5 knows that Binyam Mohamed is no longer in Pakistan, having been “rendered” elsewhere, but, the high court later concludes, continues to supply “information as well as questions which they knew were to be used in interview of [Mohamed] from the time of his arrest whilst he was held incommunicado and without access to a lawyer or review by a court or tribunal”.

October 2002 Eliza Manningham-Buller is appointed director general of the Security Service.

4 April 2004 Salahuddin Amin, a terrorism suspect from Luton, is questioned by MI5 officers 11 times after surrendering to a Pakistani intelligence agency whose use of torture is widely documented. An Old Bailey judge later says Amin’s treatment in Pakistan was “physically oppressive” and unlawful, but fell short of torture. Pakistani intelligence officers told Human Rights Watch last year that Amin’s account of being tortured before being questioned by MI5 was “essentially accurate”, and that both British and American officials were “perfectly aware that we were using all means possible to extract information from him and were grateful that we were doing so”.

27 April 2004 Pictures of US troops abusing inmates at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad are broadcast on the US television news programme 60 Minutes.

13 May 2004 The New York Times reports that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding by the CIA. The newspaper says it learned this from current and former counter-terrorism officials, and says the FBI has warned its officers not to become involved in interrogations during which waterboarding was employed, after the bureau’s director, Robert Mueller, was warned they could face prosecution. The newspaper adds: “These techniques were authorised by a set of secret rules for the interrogation of high-level Qaeda prisoners, none known to be housed in Iraq, that were endorsed by the Justice Department and the CIA.”

24 May 2004 In an apparent response to the release of the Abu Ghraib pictures, Tony Blair writes to the ISC to tell the committee of changes to the UK interrogation policy that was passed to MI5 officers and MI6 officers in January 2002. One change is that MI5 and MI6 officers are told to inform London whenever they see US counterparts mistreating inmates. They are also told they must not return to question detainees who complain they are being tortured. In practice, according to several torture victims, UK intelligence officers hand over to US interrogators after hearing such a complaint. Other changes to the interrogation policy remain secret. The government refuses to publish the policy, with David Miliband, the foreign secretary, saying that to do so could “give succour” to the UK’s enemies.

22 June 2004 The White House counsel Alberto Gonzalez and the Pentagon general counsel, Jim Haynes, hold a press conference at which they release a series of documents setting out the legal advice justifying the use of abusive interrogation techniques employed at Guantánamo.

15 May 2005 Zeeshan Siddiqui, a terrorism suspect from west London, is arrested in Pakistan, tortured, and then questioned by British intelligence officers. Pakistani intelligence officer later tell Human Rights Watch that these were MI6 officers, who were aware at all times that Siddiqui was being “processed in the traditional way”, and that the British were “effectively” interrogating Siddiqui. When Siddiqui is brought before court, the magistrate orders his immediate hospitalisation. He is eventually deported to the UK and subjected to a control order.

20 August 2005 A medical student from west London is held in a building opposite the British deputy high commission offices in Karachi and tortured, for two months, before being questioned by British intelligence officers. Pakistani agents later tell Human Rights Watch that British officials across the road knew the student was being mistreated and were “breathing down our necks for information”. The student is later released without charge.

7 August 2006 Rashid Rauf, from Birmingham, is arrested in Pakistan for questioning over an alleged plot to blow up several airliners over the Atlantic. He later tells his lawyer he was tortured before being questioned by men with both British and American accents. Human Rights Watch says that both British and Pakistani intelligence officers have told them that he was mistreated.

20 August 2006 An MI6 officer suggests to Pakistani intelligence officers that they might want to detain a British terrorism suspect, Rangzieb Ahmed, after police in Manchester decide to let him leave the UK on a flight to Islamabad. According to statements made in the Commons, Manchester crown court – sitting in secret – learned that UK intelligence officers knew that those Pakistani officials tortured terrorism suspects. MI5 and Greater Manchester police draw up questions to be put to Ahmed, who is beaten, deprived of sleep, and has three of his fingernails removed with pliers.

When Ahmed is deported to the UK to be put on trial, on the basis of evidence largely gathered before he flew to Pakistan, prosecutors attempt to claim that his fingernails were removed before he went to Pakistan. The crown’s own pathologist says the injuries show this is impossible. The judge rules that UK complicity in Ahmed’s torture is not so great that his trial cannot go ahead. The judge’s full ruling on Ahmed’s torture is being kept secret, at the request of the Crown Prosecution Service, following representations by MI5 and Greater Manchester police. Ahmed is now launching an appeal, on the basis of what the judge said in his secret ruling.

23 November 2006 Manningham-Buller tells the ISC that she regrets not asking the CIA for more information about the whereabouts of Binyam Mohamed after he was rendered from Pakistan to Morocco in July 2002. It is a case “where, with hindsight, we would regret not seeking proper full assurances,” she says. In a report published in July 2007, the committee concludes: “Whilst no assurances were sought, this is understandable given the lack of knowledge, at the time, of any possible consequences of US custody of detainees.”

However, almost five years before Manningham-Buller gave evidence to the ISC, MI5 had given its officers legal advice that facilitated the questioning of people being tortured. This was done after the service had been made aware, by an MI6 officer, that detainees were being mistreated. The ISC had been told about this legal advice – and the reasons it was issued – in September 2004, almost three years before it reported that a lack of knowledge of the mistreatment of detainees by the US authorities was understandable.

27 October 2006 The US vice-president, Dick Cheney, confirms that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding, telling an interviewer that the use of the technique was a “no-brainer”, and that “our ability to interrogate high-value detainees like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed – that’s been a very important tool that we’ve had to be able to secure the nation.” This is widely reported on both sides of the Atlantic.

21 April 2007 Manningham-Buller steps down as director-general of the Security Service.

15 October 2009 Manningham-Buller’s successor, Jonathan Evans, defends MI5’s co-operation with intelligence agencies known to use torture, saying that it thwarted many terrorist attacks after 9/11 and saved British lives. “In my view we would have been derelict in our duty if we had not worked, circumspectly, with overseas liaisons who were in a position to provide intelligence that could safeguard this country from attack,” he says.