With regard to the false information supplied by UK security officials to their opposite numbers in the USA — I think this illustrates the most profound danger the secrecy security officials demand is necessary poses to public safety.
In openly run institutions there are checks and balances. Audited financial statements have to be published. Reports have to be published, and are thus open to the scrutiny of experts who are not affiliated with the government that prepared them.
This is not true for security organizations. The secrecy they insist on means that their mistakes remain hidden, and their procedures can be profoundly sloppy and unfair, and no one will ever find out. Due to excessive secrecy, their mistakes can remain hidden for years, decades.
While this is, of course, profoundly unfair to individuals like Shaker, who end up being the target of security officials’ mistakes, I think it is important to remember the profound risk the entire public faces when vast counter-terrorism resources are marshalled, based on bad information, or bad reasoning.
I know I am repeating myself, but since the decision to invade Iraq is a good example of a decision based on bad information, I am going to repeat how correct you have been Andy to make public the discrepancy between what Colin Powell said the interrogations of Ibn Al Shaykh Al Libi established, and what we can now presume was the actual relationship between Al Libi and Al Qaeda and between Al Libi and Iraq.
I think you and I, and most people who have looked into it for themselves, have concluded that Ibn Al Shaykh Al Libi, with the assistance of Abu Zubaydah, ran a training camp that was not an al Qaeda camp, as torture apologists have claimed. Rather theirs was a rival camp. Their camp competed with al Qaeda for sponsors among the pool of oil-rich donors, who believed all observant muslims should undergo military training, and were willing to bankroll camps where the less well off could get that military training. I think the more responsible counter-terrorism analysts have quietly acknowledged that neither of these men were ever members of al Qaeda — although they were once touted as number 3 in the organization.
Colin Powell also claimed that Al Libi confessed Iraq sent trainers to Al Libi’s camp to train recruits in how to use weapons of mass destruction.