New secret evidence issues in Al Rawi case

The England and Wales High Court ordered the UK Government to disclose the 2002 and the 2004 Guidance documents for the interrogation and treatment of detainees. The documents will be disclosed immediately, unless, as it is likely, the Government will claim public interest immunity; in such case, a closed hearing will be held to see whether these two key documents are to be disclosed to the claimants.

The case involves six claimants who were detained at various locations, including Guantanamo and Bagram, and claim they have been subject to false imprisonment, trespass to the person, conspiracy to injure, torture, breach of contract, negligence, misfeasance in public office and breaches of their rights under the Human Rights Act 1998.

Last month the Court of Appeal rejected a request by the Government that evidence in the compensation claim should be kept secret from the public.

This time the request was by claimants for access to 2002 and 2004 Guidance materials relating to the interrogation and treatment of detainees. In order to understand the significance of these documents, the Court referred to two reports by the Intelligence and Security Committee.

The first, dated 2005, deals with the interviews of individuals detained by other countries; in this respect, the report mentions the episode in which a SIS officer conducted an interview of a US-held detainee on 10 January 2002 and sent back to London his “observations and the circumstances of the handling of [the] detainee by the US military before the beginning of the interview”. The day after the officer received the following instructions, an extract from the 2002 Guidance:

With regard to the status of prisoners, under the various Geneva Conventions and protocols, all prisoners, however they are described, are entitled to the same levels of protection. You have commented on their treatment. It appears from your description that they may not be being treated in accordance with the appropriate standards. Given they are not within our custody or control, the law does not require you to intervene to prevent this. That said, HMG’s stated commitment to human rights makes it important that the Americans understand that we cannot be party to such ill treatment nor can we be seen to condone it. In no case should they be coerced during or in conjunction with an SIS interview of them. If circumstances allow, you should consider drawing this to the attention of a suitably senior US official locally.

The 2004 Guidance is then referred in the report of the ISC of July 2007:

“From 2004 it became clear to SIS and the security service that their existing Guidance to staff on dealing with foreign liaison services was insufficiently detailed given the increasing requirement to cooperate with foreign services in counter-terrorism operations. They therefore began to expand their Guidance, and as elements were finalised they were formally issued to staff”.

In a footnote, it is then explained that “Advice on participation in detention operations and interviews was formally issued to SIS and security staff in 2005”.

Hence, it is clear that if the Guidance had been seen as insufficient, this may prove that the Government was  in a way closing its eyes to the actions of foreign intelligence agencies.

Government solicitors opposed the disclosure of the two documents on the grounds that, due to the very large number of documents identified (over 250,000) and the sensitivity of the material, the disclosure exercise would be “unprecedented” in its scale.

However, the judge decided that disclosure could not wait more, since some of the claims arise from events already seven or eight years ago, and that he welcomed any potential disclosure that may shorten the probable length of the trial.

In my view, the balancing exercise leads to the clear result that the Guidance documents should be disclosed and subject to a PII hearing to determine how much of it can be inspected. The extraordinary past and anticipated delays in disclosure of the Guidance documents requires the court to take decisive actions to ensure that the claims progress… These important claims would then be precluded from coming to trial for very many years even though their claims are already 7 or 8 years old.
This is massive litigation in which I assume all parties are financed by public funds and anything which can be done which might assist in expediting the resolution of the dispute should be adopted unless it will cause unfairness.

Allegations of secret Colombian plan to undermine EU

(EU Observer) A group of MEPs is calling for action as further details of an alleged covert operation conducted by the Colombian intelligence agency (DAS) continue to emerge, with one of its reported aims being to undermine the authority of the European Parliament.

Recently released documents that were confiscated from the DAS by the Colombian Attorney General’s office highlight the nature of “Operation Europe.” Its objective was to “neutralise the influence of the European judicial system, the European Parliament’s human rights sub-committee, and the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights,” reads one text seen by this website.

Former right-wing President Alvaro Uribe introduced legislation late last year to overhaul the controversial agency, although it has yet to be approved by the country’s legislature.

However, a group of MEPs, primarily from the European Parliament’s Green group, are not satisfied, fearing that the reported campaign of close surveillance and threat-making against Bogota’s critics may simply continue under a different guise, and ask for full police and judicial investigation of the alleged crimes.

The situation is expected to change with Belgium taking over the EU’s rotating presidency on 1st July.

“The Spanish government is very in favour of the free trade agreement with Colombia [initialed in May], and they don’t want anything to jeopardise that,” the Austrian deputy told EUobserver. “But then the Belgians will take over the presidency and they have citizens that have been proven to have suffered phone tapping by the DAS.”

Among the Belgian citizens who claim to have been victims of DAS activities is Paul-Emile Dupret, a Belgian political advisor to the European Parliament’s left-wing United European Left (GUE) group.

“My name is mentioned on the DAS file several times,” he says, believing it to be partially the result of his involvement in the organisation of an anti-Uribe protest in 2004 when the ex-President visited the European Parliament.

Several months after the protest, Mr Dupret was arrested upon landing in the United States. “I was interrogated when I arrived, put in prison for 24 hours, asked dozens of questions about by views on Colombia,” he says. “Since then I have been prevented from returning to the US. They now consider me a terrorist.”

The Belgian citizen is currently working with a group of other victims and a team of lawyers, and plans to present their collective case against the Colombian agency in the Belgian courts this July, the first European citizens to do so.

Certain European NGOs also claim to have been the target of a concerted campaign to discredit their activities and tarnish their reputations.

1946 UK-US intelligence agreement published

The Guardian reports that the terms of a 1946 secret agreement that became the core of the special relationship between Britain and the US have been recently published (read it here).

A six-page “British-US Communication Intelligence Agreement”, known as BRUSA, later UKUSA, tied the two countries into a worldwide network of listening posts run by GCHQ, Britain’s biggest spying organisation, and its US equivalent, the National Security Agency.

Though its existence has long been known, the agreement, negotiated in London in March 1946, is only now being published, and for the first time officially acknowledged, after freedom of information requests in Britain and the US. Under the agreement, the countries agreed to exchange the knowledge from operations involving intercepting, decoding and translating foreign communications, including the “acquisition of communication documents and equipment”.

A GCHQ spokesman said last night: “The 1946 UKUSA agreement formed the basis for co-operation between the two countries throughout the cold war and continues to be essential in keeping the UK safe from today’s threats.”

Ed Hampshire, a senior records specialist at the National Archives, said: “The agreement represented a crucial moment in the development of the ‘special relationship’ between the two wartime allies and captured the spirit and practice of the signals intelligence co-operation which had evolved on an ad-hoc basis during the second world war.”

He added: “As the threat posed by Nazi Germany was replaced by a new one in the east, the agreement formed the basis for intelligence co-operation during the cold war. The two nations – linked by common bonds of history, culture and language – agreed not to collect intelligence against each other or to tell any ‘third party’ about the existence of the agreement.”

Pentagon allegedly reviving Bush-era domestic spy program

IntelNews.org reports that an obscure unit under the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), called the Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC), is suspected to have resuscitated a notorious Bush-era domestic surveillance program, the Threat and Local Observation Notice (TALON), which was banned by Congress for being too obtrusive.

TALON, a US Air Force intelligence collection program aimed to gather data on potential threats to American armed forces personnel in the US and abroad, was authorized in 2002 by the then Deputy Secretary of Defense, Paul Wolfowitz. But the initiative was allegedly shelved by the Bush administration, after it emerged that TALON intelligence collection focused largely on political policing against lawful antiwar groups.

New reports suggest that DCHC is creating a new system of consolidated databases whose focus closely resembles that of TALON. Official descriptions of the DCHC surveillance program state that it will focus on information that would help Defense analysts “identify or counter foreign intelligence and terrorist threats to the DoD and the United States”. But two anonymous US officials told reporters that, back in 2007, when TALON was banned, most of its intelligence collection focus was actually transferred to DCHC. The latter scaled down but essentially continued the controversial intelligence activities.