Eliza Manningham-Buller, then head of the UK domestic intelligence service MI5, admitted in 2005 that the UK government was reluctant to ask too many questions about the provenance of intelligence material coming from third countries. To do so, she asserted, “would be likely to damage co-operation and the future flow of intelligence from the originating service.”58 The consequences of this approach are illustrated by UK cooperation with Pakistan, one of the UK’s principal partners. UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown has asserted that 75 percent of the most serious terrorism plots in the UK can be traced back to Pakistan.59 Pakistan has a well-documented history of torture, arbitrary arrests and detention, enforced disappearances, and other human rights abuses by government security forces and intelligence agencies. These practices are systematic and routine, whether used in ordinary criminal matters to obtain confessions or information, against political and ideological opponents or in more sensitive intelligence and counterterrorism cases. The military-controlled Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) is notorious for routinely resorting to illegal detentions and torture to extract confessions and to punish and intimidate terrorism suspects. Pakistani and international nongovernmental organizations, including Human Rights Watch, have documented the illegal detention and severe mistreatment of detainees over the course of many years. Our report, Cruel Britannia: British Complicity in the Torture and Ill-treatment of Terror Suspects in Pakistan, includes harrowing details about the brutal abuse of Pakistani and British citizens in ISI custody and UK complicity in that abuse.60 In its 2008 human rights country report on Pakistan, the US State Department described a dire situation: “[S]ecurity forces, including intelligence services, tortured and abused individuals in custody. Under provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act, coerced confessions are admissible in antiterrorism courts...Alleged torture occasionally resulted in death or serious injury. Human rights organizations reported methods including beating with batons and whips, burning with cigarettes, whipping soles of the feet, prolonged isolation, electric shock, 58 Witness statement of September 20, 2005, submitted in support of the case for Secretary of State for the Home Department in the case of A and others v. Secretary of State for the Home Department before the House of Lords. 59 “Brown: Pakistan linked to most UK terror plots,” CNN.com, December 14, 2008, http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/asiapcf/12/14/india.mumbia.suspect/index.html (accessed November 2, 2009). 60 Human Rights Watch, Cruel Britannia: British Complicity in Torture and Ill-treatmentof Terrorism Suspects in Pakistan, November 2009,www.hrw.org/en/reports/2009/11/24/cruel-britannia-0. “No Questions Asked” 24