MI5 ''didn't know the US used torture''

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Intelligent services didn't know the US was torturing terror suspects, they hid the fact from MI5 until 2007, according to former secret service head Baroness Manningham-Buller.

In a lecture she said that the US had deliberately withheld details of any mistreatment because it was "very keen" its ally didn't know how it was managing to get hold of key intelligence .

In the case of Binyam Mohamed, she said, MI5 was very surprised at how much he was revealing but had no idea that 'waterboarding' was being used to persuade him to talk.

"I said to my staff 'Why is he talking?'," she said, "because our experience of Irish prisoners, Irish terrorists, was that they never said anything." She said the Americans claimed he was happy to boast of his achievements but added: "It wasn't actually until after I retired that I read that, in fact, he had been waterboarded 160 times."

The current MI5 head Jonathan Evans has always claimed that the US and British security services did not work together in Mohamed's torture.