Human Rights Glance
William Hague today stepped up pressure on the government over claims that the Foreign Office asked the US for help in suppressing crucial evidence concerning torture allegations.
The shadow foreign secretary wrote to David Miliband demanding urgent clarification on a number of specific allegations about whether the UK was complicit in the mistreatment or torture of Guantánamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.
Today Downing Street rallied to Miliband's defence, insisting that the Foreign Office had merely asked the US to "set out its position in writing" when it solicited a letter for the American authorities to back up its claim that, if the evidence was disclosed, Washington could stop sharing intelligence with Britain.
Anti-terror measures worldwide have seriously undermined international human rights law, a report by legal experts says. After a three-year global study, the International Commission of Jurists said many states used the public's fear of terrorism to introduce measures.
Newly declassified Defense Department documents describe a pattern of “abusive” behavior by U.S. military interrogators that appears to have caused the deaths of several suspected terrorists imprisoned at a detention center in Afghanistan in December 2002, just two days after former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld authorized the use of “enhanced interrogation” techniques against prisoners in that country. 
The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,” the official said.
