UK spy agencies knew source of false Iraq war intelligence was tortured

Middle East Eye reveals today that British intelligence agencies fed questions to the interrogators of a captured terrorism suspect whom they knew was being seriously mistreated in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and ministers then relied upon his answers to help justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Through an analysis of redacted official documents, including the recent reports from Parliament's Intelligence and Security Committee, journalist Ian Cobain has established that an MI6 officer was aware that CIA officers had placed the detainee in question, Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, inside a sealed coffin at a US-run prison in Afghanistan. The officer had then watched as the coffin was loaded onto a truck and driven to an aircraft that was waiting to fly to Egypt.

In an incident report sent to MI6 headquarters in London, the officer and his colleagues reported that “we were tempted to speak out” at the treatment of Libi, but did not. “The event reinforced the uneasy feeling of operating in a legal wilderness,” they said.

False intelligence induced by Al-Libi's torture, was then relied on by both the US and the UK to build the case for war in Iraq, says the article. 

Read the full article here.