The Government has announced a judicial enquiry into the torture allegations involving MI5. As part of the package, they are attempting to persuade the six former detainees who are suing for wrongful imprisonment to abandon their litigation and to abort requests for the documents (some 500,000 of them) which spell out the callousness of Britain's official response to the imprisonment and torture of some of its Muslim citizens.
The Government has failed. The former detainees seem startlingly insistent. It is almost as if they think they have the right to know why their own elected representatives stood by while they were tortured by the Americans, Pakistanis and others.
"Yesterday," states the Guardian, 15th. July, 2010, "the government failed in an attempt to bring a temporary halt to the proceedings that have resulted in the disclosure of the documents. Its lawyers argued that the case should be delayed while attempts were made to mediate with the six men, in the hope that their claims could be withdrawn in advance of the judicial inquiry. Lawyers for the former Guantanamo inmates said it as far from certain that mediation would succeed, and insisted the disclosure process continue."
One of the detainees, when interviewed by MI5, complained of internal bleeding and violent mis-treatment. ".... what kind of world was it," he asked, "where the Americans were more barbaric than the Pakistanis? We listened," wrote an MI5 officer, "but did not comment."
(How very British!)
MI5 did not believe that this prisoner, Omar Deghayes, was telling them the truth.
The officers "proposed disengaging and allowing events here to take their course."
As a result of this official British 'disengagement', Deghayes was rendered to Guantanamo Bay and stayed there for more than five years.
"At one point he was so severely beaten that he was blinded in one eye."
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