A former head of Britain’s domestic spy agency has accused the US of concealing its abuse of terror suspects, stepping up an MI5 fightback over accusations that it colluded in torture.
Eliza Manningham-Buller said on Tuesday she had not understood why alleged Sept. 11, 2001, mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been willing to talk to US interrogators.
She said she only discovered he had been waterboarded when she read about it after her retirement in 2007.
“The Americans were very keen that people like us did not discover what they were doing,” she said in a specially arranged lecture at Britain’s upper house of parliament in London.
The US had been “very keen to conceal from us what was happening.”
Her comments came as the spy agency hits back at claims it colluded with US counterparts in the torture of terror suspects.
The allegations were sparked by a British court’s decision last month to release details of US torture of a former Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, inmate.
Former prisoner Binyam Mohamed — who was born in Ethiopia but is a British resident — has charged he was asked questions by US interrogators that could only have come from the British intelligence services.
Ministers and current MI5 head Jonathan Evans have strongly denied the accusations of collusion. But there were still question marks over when Britain knew about the US apparently changing its rules on torture following the Sept. 11 attacks.
Manningham-Buller’s remarks could put the intelligence-sharing relationship between Washington and London, already strained by last month’s court decision that angered the US, under further pressure.
In her comments on Tuesday, she did not mention the recent case, but focused on the treatment by the US of the alleged mastermind of the attacks on New York and Washington that killed nearly 3,000 people.
She said she had wondered how, in 2002 and 2003, the US had been able to supply Britain with intelligence from Mohammed.
“I said to my staff, ‘Why is he talking?’ because our experience of Irish prisoners, Irish terrorists, was that they never said anything,” she said.
“They said, ‘Well, the Americans say he is very proud of his achievements’ when questioned about it,’” she said.
“It wasn’t actually until after I retired that I read that, in fact, he had been waterboarded 160 times,” Manningham-Buller said.
She said Britain had lodged “protests” with the Americans about its treatment of detainees, but gave no further details.
Last month, one senior judge criticized the “dubious record” of some members of Britain’s secret services in a ruling ordering the release of information on the Mohamed case.
The British security services had denied knowledge of any ill-treatment of US detainees, said Lord David Neuberger, head of the civil justice system in England and Wales.
“Yet, in this case, that does not seem to have been true,” he said.
When details of the Mohamed case emerged last month, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband dismissed suggestions that MI5 had lied over its involvement in the case.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he had “every confidence” in the security services.
“We do not torture and we do not ask others to do so on our behalf. We are clear that officials must not be complicit in mistreatment of detainees,” Brown said.
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