Guantánamo Bay detainee says interrogation record was blanked

Source: Guardian

Guantánamo Bay detainee says interrogation record was blanked
Rajeev Syal and Owen Bowcott guardian.co.uk,
Sunday 18 July 2010 20.59 BST

A former Guantánamo Bay detainee says that key exchanges from his interrogation by British security service officers have been blacked out or deliberately omitted from the notes to hide the agents' complicity in torture. Other exchanges, he says, have been removed simply to hide evidence of spurious and potentially embarrassing lines of questioning.

Omar Deghayes, one of six UK detainees suing the government over their clandestine removal to the US base in Cuba, was able for the first time to read notes from his interrogations after they were published by the Guardian last week. He alleges that they provide an inaccurate impression of what took place, and that a true record of his meetings with British security would have shown that he made specific allegations of ill-treatment, starvation and beatings to MI6 and MI5 officers.

One of the notes he has now been able to examine, released through the high court as part of his case against the government and the security services, blacks out, or redacts, repeated questions put to him about his involvement in the Chechen freedom movement, he says. This was a false allegation that, unbeknown to Deghayes, was the key reason for his being held by the US authorities for five years.

Deghayes says that other passages, if they had not been redacted, would have revealed that he was asked repeatedly to justify scuba-diving lessons taken at a Sussex swimming club, and that he was questioned about Britain's immigrant community.


Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/18/guantanamo-bay-interrogation-detainee

went on during the Bush/Blair years.

At least we knew Bush was stupid and evil, but Blair looked like he was halfway competent.

I'm so old, I remember when the United States and Great Britain used to work against regimes that did this sort of thing.

.