Guant�namo Bay files: Britain joined renditions despite knowing of torture

Most UK nationals were only sent to Camp X-ray after Labour ministers and senior officials knew abuses were occurring

The British government became a partner in the US programme of extraordinary rendition even after learning that it involved the torture of detainees, the Guant�namo files show.

Most of the British nationals who were detained at the prison camp on Cuba were consigned there only after ministers and senior officials in London had been warned that the abuses were occurring.

Most of the former British residents who spent years at Guant�namo were also sent there after the point at which UK authorities became aware of the torture.

The disclosure contradicts claims by senior figures in the last Labour government that the UK had become involved in rendition only because they were slow to understand what the Americans were doing.

Documents disclosed at the high court when six of the former inmates sued the British government for damages in 2010 showed that during the first week in January 2002 ministers were still considering the possibility of flying British nationals captured in Afghanistan back to the UK to be prosecuted, possibly for treason.

The first US combat engineers arrived on Cuba on 6 January to begin construction of Camp X-ray, a maximum security prison designed to hold hundreds of suspected Taliban fighters and suspected al-Qaida supporters.

Within four days the UK government had abandoned plans for prosecutions, with ministers deciding their "preferred option" was rendition of British nationals. On 10 January Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, issued a secret telegram in which he said their transfer to the US base was "the best way to meet our counter-terrorism obectives". He added that their removal should be delayed long enough to allow questioning by a "specialist team" of MI5 interrogators. Much of the telegram was redacted before it was disclosed in 2010 to lawyers representing the former Guant�namo inmates.

Four days later Tom McKane, a senior official attached to the Cabinet Office, sent a six-page memo to David Manning, Tony Blair's senior foreign policy adviser, naming three British citizens held in Afghanistan and noting that they were "possibly being tortured" at what he described as a "part 3 jail" in Kabul.

By 18 January at the latest Blair was aware of the strong possibility that America's prisoners in the so-called war on terror were being tortured, writing by hand in the margins of one Foreign Office memo: "The key is to find out how they are being treated. Though I was initially sceptical about claims of torture, we must make it clear to the US that any such action would be totally unacceptable." He added that British officials must "v quickly establish that it isn't happening".

The Guant�namo files show that by that time only two British nationals ? Feroz Abassi, from south London, and Asif Iqbal (one of the so-called Tipton Three along with Shafiq Rasul and Jamal al-Harith) ? had been rendered to Camp X-ray. A further seven were to be sent there in the coming months despite the prime minister having lost his scepticism over the Americans' use of torture.

The documents disclosed at the high court show that in the case of one man, Martin Mubanga, either Blair or someone close to him at Downing Street intervened to ensure he could not escape rendition to Guant�namo.

Senior MI5 and MI6 officers were aware of the way in which the US authorities were mistreating people captured in Afghanistan. When an MI6 officer warned London that prisoners were being mistreated before interrogation at Bagram air base, north of Kabul, the agencies informed their officers in the field that they could not "be seen to condone" torture but were under no legal obligation to try to stop it.

Around the same time that the decision was taken to consign British nationals to Guant�namo, the euphemism "handling" was being coined at the highest levels of British government to describe the manner in which the prisoners were being treated. Straw's secret telegram said: "It is for the US authorities to determine the detail of how these prisoners should be handled. They have told us they would be treated humanely." Three months later a senior home office official was noting, apparently with some relief, that on the matter of "handling", there had been "no press coverage here during the last four weeks".

At the end of February the US was telling the British government that it could have all of the British detainees if desired. But a meeting of security officials concluded that the UK "should not be in any hurry" to take them. The foreign office was said to have remained "quiet" on this point: it had "some obvious problems of public presentation".

Four more British nationals were flown to Guant�namo during February 2002. Another was rendered there in April and one was dispatched in May. The final British national to be rendered to the camp was Richard Belmar, from west London, who was sent there in October after spending almost eight months at Bagram.

MI5 officers spent months questioning detainees at Bagram, fully aware of the mistreatment and apparently content to see it continue. After interrogating Omar Deghayes, a Libyan-born refugee raised in Brighton, an MI5 officer reported back to London: "He was also being treated badly, with head-braces and lock-down positions being the order of the day. He was treated better by the Pakistanis; what kind of world was it where the Americans were more barbaric than the Pakistanis? We listened but did not comment." MI5 decided that as Deghayes had not been co-operative "we propose disengaging and allowing events here to take their course". Deghayes was flown to Guant�namo Bay, where he remained for more than five years, at one point losing an eye.

MI5 and MI6 officers also took part in large numbers of interrogations at Guant�namo. British government ministers then repeatedly denied there had been any UK involvement in rendition. Four years after sending out his secret telegram Straw was still telling MPs that media reports on UK involvement in the US programme were "conspiracy theories" and that unless they believed he was lying they should accept that "there simply is no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition".

As recently as July 2009 Straw was expressing his "abhorrence of rendition" and telling the Commons that he stood by his "conspiracy theories" statement.

In recent years senior security and intelligence have privately defended their actions by insisting that they had been slow to realise the Americans were torturing their detainees at Guant�namo and elsewhere.

It is a defence that has been employed publicly by a number of former ministers. In August last year, for example, on launching his bid to become Labour leader, David Miliband, the former foreign secretary, said in an interview: "The facts are that bad things were done by the Americans after 2002 and they didn't tell anyone else. Slowly the pieces of the jigsaw were put together and when they were put together the British government acted."

A few weeks earlier, in announcing an inquiry into the UK's involvement in the programme, David Cameron told MPs that one of the questions to be asked by the inquiry panel was: "Should we have realised sooner that what foreign agencies were doing may have been unacceptable and that we shouldn't be associated with it?"

Ian Cobain

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