Binyam Mohamed may or may not have received firearms and explosives training from al Qa’eda or fought alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan. He may or may not have been involved alongside Jose Padilla in a dirty bomb plot that may or may not have existed.

If there is evidence of involvement in conspiracy to murder and commit terrorism – and those are the charges Mohamed faces – it is right that the matter be brought before a court. If he is found guilty, it is right that he be punished.

None of this is in dispute. Yet the very same first principles underline that Mohamed, like any person standing in the dock accused of any crime, is entitled to justice. Even if the argument from the ABCs of jurisprudence were not so wholly persuasive, brute pragmatism points in the same direction too.

The sophisticated public relations wing of the Islamist terror milieu will inevitably seek to present the proceedings to the Muslim world as a politically-motivated a frame-up. That Mohamed will stand before a no-jury kangaroo court and could face the death sentence hardly complicates that task; it would be mistaken to render the publicists’ job even easier.

All the more vital, then, that his contention that the case against him is largely based on confessions extracted by torture be given proper consideration.

Mohamed says that he was seized by American and British intelligence officials in Pakistan in 2002, and thereafter taken to Morocco. During 18 months detention in that country, he claims that he was regularly beaten and scalded, and his penis slashed with a scalpel.

Following a spell in a CIA facility in Kabul – during which he says he suffered sleep deprivation, starvation and further beatings – he has since 2004 been held in Guantanamo Bay. Despite a formal request for his return in 2007, he remains the last Briton still in custody at the western hemisphere’s most famous interment camp.

Seven paragraphs in a report from the US government to the British government are widely presumed to provide strong documentary support for this story. Naturally, Mohamed’s legal team has applied to the High Court for publication.

The two-judge panel left no doubt that it thought the missing wording should be in the public domain. Nothing in the text exposes any intelligence agents to any risk, they stressed.

But the Foreign Office refuses to release the information, for fear that the US would then cease to share intelligence with the UK, and the judges say that they cannot overrule the Foreign Office.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband defended the position in the Commons today, arguing that:

… the disclosure of the intelligence documents at issue by order of UK courts against the wishes of the US authorities would indeed cause real and significant damage to the national security and international relations of this country.

This stance is myopic in the extreme. Not to allow publication would be massive counterproductive and a serious error from every standpoint. Such temporary embarrassment as the disclosure would cause will be more than offset by the long-term consequences of the cover up. Miliband should order the immediate release of all relevant material.

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1. Pickled Politics » Full Disclosure or Damage Control

   [...] Osler has articulated the normative response to the FO which is difficult to disagree with: This stance is myopic in the extreme. Not to allow [...]

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