Court orders release of tightly held details about interrogation

Seven secret paragraphs detailing the suspected torture of a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, should be disclosed, a British High Court ruled, a decision that could ignite fresh criticism of U.S. interrogation practices and raise prickly questions for the British government.

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who moved to Britain as a teenager, was arrested in 2002 in Pakistan for using a false passport. After his arrest, he was sent to Morocco, Afghanistan and then Guantánamo in 2004.

He claims the United States and Britain were complicit in his torture in Pakistan and Morocco.

In their 2008 ruling on whether to release material relating to Mohamed's treatment while in captivity, the judges ordered the disclosure of some intelligence documents but said they were forced to keep seven paragraphs of U.K.-U.S. exchanges secret out of a British claim that national security could be harmed.

Lord Justice John Thomas and Justice David Lloyd Jones reversed their original ruling Friday by saying that the public interest in disclosing the seven paragraphs was "overwhelming" and the risk to national security was not "a serious one."

Britain's Foreign Secretary David Miliband promised an immediate appeal, which would delay the release of the material.

"It remains my assessment that the consequence of the court's judgment today, if left unchallenged, will be a restriction on what is shared with us," he said.

Miliband has long said the intelligence exchanges originated in the United States and that it was up to the United States to release the material.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly criticized the British court's decision. "We both have a stake in ensuring that this kind of intelligence sharing continues to the fullest extent possible," he said in Washington.

The case began more than a year ago, when Mohamed was facing a military trial at Guantánamo. His lawyers sued the British government for intelligence documents they said could prove that evidence against him had been gathered under torture.

But the U.S. charges against Mohamed were dropped, President Obama took office and Mohamed was sent back to Britain, a chain of events that led to the lawsuit in Britain becoming a larger battle for access to information.

The case has been unique: The judges have repeatedly lashed out at the U.S. and British governments for trying to conceal information while taking the extraordinary step of encouraging the media to join in the legal challenge to disclose the information.

Lawyers for Mohamed and several media organizations, including The Associated Press, argued that the public had the right to know if Britain had colluded in Mohamed's treatment — a possible violation of several international treaties — or if the United States had used controversial interrogation practices.

Mohamed, 31, said Friday's ruling could finally allow the public to understand the depths of U.S. and British involvement in his and other's detention.

"The public needs to know what their government has been up to for the last seven years," he told the British Broadcasting Corp.

Associated Press writers David Stringer in London and Matthew Lee in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.