Britain Discloses Data on Ex-Detainee

LONDON — The British government lost a protracted court battle on Wednesday to protect secret American intelligence information about the treatment of a former Guantánamo Bay detainee and immediately published details of what it called the “cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment” administered to the detainee by American officials.

The seven-paragraph summary published on the Foreign Office Web site summarized secret information provided by United States intelligence officials to Britain’s Security Service, MI5, on the treatment of Binyam Mohamed, a 31-year-old Ethiopian. Mr. Mohamed, the son of an Ethiopian Airlines official, moved to Britain as a teenager and left for Pakistan before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a move he has said he made in order to get help in breaking a drug habit. He was arrested there in early 2002 on suspicion of planning terrorist attacks on targets in the United States.

Under intense American pressure, the Foreign Office had sought to prevent publication of the summary it provided in a secret submission to a British court of what it knew of Mr. Mohamed’s treatment by his American captors. Over many months, Foreign Office lawyers had battled with Mr. Mohamed’s lawyers, citing warnings from Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others, that the summary’s publication could cause irrevocable damage to intelligence-sharing between the United States and Britain — a relationship British officials said was essential to Britain’s security, in particular to its counterterrorism operations.

As posted on the Foreign Office Web site, the summary said that while Mr. Mohamed had been in American custody before reaching the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had been subjected to “continuous sleep deprivation,” shackled during interrogations and exposed to “threats and inducements” that included playing on his fears of being “removed from United States custody and ‘disappearing.’ ” The document said he had been kept on a suicide watch and cited that as evidence that the treatment was causing him “significant mental stress and suffering.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/11/world/europe/11britain.html?ref=global-home&pagewanted=print