The head of Britain’s MI5 security service denied on Friday that his agency colluded in torture after a court ruling showed it knew that a detained British resident had been abused by U.S. intelligence officers.
In a rare public intervention, MI5 Director-General Jonathan Evans said criticism of the security agency could play into the hands of Britain’s enemies.
In addition to bombs and bullets, they would use “propaganda and campaigns to undermine our will and ability to confront them”, he wrote in the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
“We would do well to maintain a fair and balanced view of events … and avoid falling into conspiracy theory and caricature,” he said.
MI5, Britain’s domestic security and counter-intelligence agency, helps to investigate terrorist plots against Britain, where suicide bombings on the London transport system killed 52 people in 2005.
MI5 has been criticized in the media since the government lost a legal battle on Wednesday to prevent the disclosure of U.S. intelligence material relating to allegations of “cruel and inhuman” treatment involving the CIA.
The judges disclosed reports provided to MI5 by the CIA that Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who has been fighting to prove he was tortured and that British authorities knew about it, had been shackled, threatened and deprived of sleep in U.S. custody.
One paragraph of the judge’s ruling that strongly criticized MI5 was deleted at the request of a government lawyer.
Evans said he accepted criticism by an official committee that British intelligence had been slow to detect “the emerging pattern of U.S. mistreatment of detainees” after the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities.
“But there wasn’t any similar change of practice by the British intelligence agencies. We did not practice mistreatment or torture then and do not do so now, nor do we collude in torture or encourage others to torture on our behalf,” he said.
The British government had argued that full disclosure of the reports of Mohamed’s treatment might make the United States less willing to share intelligence and thus prejudice Britain’s national security.
Mohamed was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002 and accused of receiving training from al Qaeda. He says he was tortured there in the presence of British intelligence officers.
He says he was flown to Morocco on a CIA plane and held there for 18 months, during which he says he was repeatedly tortured, including having his penis cut with a knife. Morocco has denied holding him.
In July 2002, he says he was taken to Morocco on a CIA plane and again tortured for 18 months. U.S. authorities have said he was transferred to Afghanistan in 2004 and later moved to Guantanamo Bay. He was never charged, and was returned to Britain in February 2009.
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