Yvonne Bradley

Lieutenant-Colonel Yvonne Bradley has been a military lawyer in the United States for 20 years. Bradley spent six years as a regular officer in the judge-advocate general's branch of the US Air Force and worked for a further seven years for Reprieve, an organisation providing legal representation to death row inmates. Bradley is notable for volunteering to serve on behalf Guantanamo captives. Having volunteered following an appeal for military lawyers to take up the cases of Guantanamo Bay detainees in 2005, Bradley became the defence counsel for British resident Binyam Mohamed, who was held at the prison camp for five years before he was released on 23 February 2009. Bradley's evidence of Mohamed's torture while in US custody, and of British intelligence involvement in his interrogation, provoked a political scandal in Britain.

Pressure on UK

On 5 February 2009, as a result of persistent torture allegations and criticism that Britain was keeping supporting evidence secret, British Foreign Secretary David Miliband made a statement to the House of Commons concerning Binyam Mohamed's case. Four days later, Yvonne Bradley travelled to Britain to urge the Foreign Office to press harder for Mohamed's release from Guantanamo Bay. Bradley told BBC News that her client was very ill as a result of a hunger strike. "Mr Mohamed needs to be released now and not later," said Bradley. When asked why he was still at the camp, despite charges being dropped and the British government saying it was pressing for his release, she said: "That's the million dollar question. He should not be there."

Torture allegations

Interviewed by Jon Snow of Channel 4 News on 9 February 2009, Yvonne Bradley asserted that there was no doubt that Mohamed had been tortured, and that Britain and the US were complicit in his torture. Prior to Bradley's meeting with David Miliband on 11 February 2009, she wrote in The Guardian: "The greatest injustice I fear is that Binyam Mohamed is still being held at Guantanamo Bay only to suppress evidence of his torture.

The Foreign Secretary issued a statement after meeting with Bradley in which he said: "I met Binyam Mohamed's US military defence counsel Lt Col Yvonne Bradley today. I wanted to hear her views personally, particularly following her recent visit to Guantanamo. We have long been concerned by reports of Mr Mohamed's medical condition, and her account underlined those concerns."

Details of abuses

Following Mohamed's arrival in Britain on 23 February 2009, he released a statement which did not detail the alleged torture he had endured.

However, Bradley did not skimp on any of the detail. She told the BBC: "He had a scalpel used on his chest and on his genitals. He was severely beaten. There are also periods of times where he was hung up by his wrists - all Spanish Inquisition techniques - and left there for weeks upon end."

Bradley also wrote a long critique of British and American involvement in the mistreatment of Mohamed, which was published in the New Statesman magazine on the day after Mohamed's release.

And, in a two-part interview with Amnesty International later in February, Bradley set out fully all the abuses suffered by Mohamed at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

Allegations of MI5 'collusion'

In her New Statesman article, Bradley wrote: "We also know that during May 2002 British officials in the form of MI5 officers joined their US intelligence partners. They took part in interrogation sessions and turned a blind eye to the fact that Binyam was being illegally detained and denied a lawyer. According to Binyam, an MI5 officer who questioned him was well aware that the US intended to move him to a third country, most likely an Arabic one where he'd be further mistreated and tortured to make him 'cooperative'."

Two weeks after his release, Binyam Mohamed expanded upon the information published by Bradley. He claimed that British intelligence (MI5) had colluded with his interrogators by getting them to ask him specific questions which led to his making false confessions of terrorist activities. In the first memo, which was shown to him in Guantanamo by Bradley, the MI5 agent asked for a name to be put to him and then for him to be questioned further about that person. The second telegram concerned a further interrogation. Although his claims of MI5 collusion are being investigated by the government, the Shadow Justice Secretary, Dominic Grieve, called for a judicial inquiry into the allegations and for the matter to be referred to the police. Shami Chakrabarti, director of campaign group Liberty said: "These are more than allegations - these are pieces of a puzzle that are being put together. It makes an immediate criminal investigation absolutely inescapable."

The allegations quickly led to a high-level political controversy. On 18 March 2009, after receiving a report from the House of Commons Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), prime minister Gordon Brown announced his decision to ask the ISC to look again at the policy governing the interrogation of detainees "to reassure ourselves that everything has been done to ensure that our practices are in line with UK and international law". However, campaigners were critical of the announcement. Reprieve, the legal charity which represents Mohamed, said that asking the ISC to examine what has gone wrong was "a textbook case of the fox guarding the hen house".

Bradley's promise

Having secured Binyam Mohamed's release, Yvonne Bradley plans to return to America - perhaps to aid further Guantanamo inmates - and said: "I was able to keep a promise. There's not many promises I can keep but the last time I saw him at Guantanamo Bay I told him 'next time I see you Binyam, you'll be a free man'. So I'm overwhelmed, I'm thrilled that in these three years of representing him, [I can] keep at least one promise."

She added: "But for now I look forward to spending time with Binyam Mohamed again, not as a political prisoner wrongfully imprisoned in Cuba but as a free man on British soil."