MPs seek to resist CIA demands over disclosure

http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2012/apr/04/mps-resist-cia-demands-disclosure
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The Bush administration told the Labour government that it would restrict the amount of intelligence the US passed to MI5 and MI6 if British courts were allowed to disclose such intelligence. The threat was prompted by an appeal court ruling in 2010 that a brief summary of CIA information about Binyam Mohamed, a British resident brutally treated in Pakistan, Morocco, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, should be disclosed.

MI5 and MI6 responded to the threat by telling Labour ministers, and subsequently the coalition government, that a law must be introduced to prevent any intelligence information from ever being disclosed in court. They said they had been forced, in another case, to pay millions of pounds in compensation to UK citizens and residents incarcerated in Guantánamo in an out-of-court settlement. That, they claimed, was the only way to prevent sensitive intelligence from emerging in court. MI5 and MI6 are defending the "control principle" whereby the original gatherer of intelligence must decide whether or not it can ever be disclosed, not those subsequently provided with it. Thus the CIA, and the CIA alone, decides whether intelligence it passed to MI5 or MI6 can be revealed.

The joint parliamentary human rights committee of MPs and peers makes it clear what it thinks of such a principle. "An absolute exemption cannot in our view be considered to be consistent with the rule of law," it states.

The government, it says, appears to want "to be able to give a cast-iron guarantee to the Americans that any intelligence shared with the UK will never be disclosed without the Americans' consent".

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So much for transparency and due process of law