The former head of Britain's domestic intelligence service, MI5, has accused the United States of concealing its mistreatment of terror suspects.

Eliza Manningham-Buller said Tuesday that the U.S. deliberately held back details of harsh handling of some detainees, including the waterboarding of alleged September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Manningham-Buller's comments come as the British intelligence service fights charges it collaborated with U.S. agencies in torturing terror suspects.

British appeals court judges ordered the government last month to release documents concerning the treatment of a Guantanamo inmate Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born man living in Britain.

U.S. forces arrested him in Pakistan in 2002 on suspicion of terrorism.  U.S. documents show that Mohamed was shackled, beaten and subjected to genital mutilation and sleep deprivation while held in Morocco and later at Guantanamo.

The British government had said it wanted to keep the information secret, fearing it could hurt intelligence-sharing with the United States. Add a comment

A third of the world's jailed journalists are imprisoned in Iran, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), which says the number of reporters held in the Islamic republic rose to at least 52 in February.

China was next after Iran with 24 jailed journalists and then Cuba with 22. The number of journalists held in Iran was the highest recorded by the New York-based CPJ in a single country since 78 cases were documented in Turkey in 1996.

Several publications in Iran have been banned and many journalists detained since street protests broke out in the aftermath of presidential elections last year.

The CPJ said the number of journalists jailed in Iran rose by five in February from January after 12 members of the media were imprisoned and then seven of them were released.

Of the 52 journalists in jail, five had been held since before the crackdown began last year, the CPJ said. Another 50 journalists have been imprisoned and released on bail during the past several months.

"Iran is entering a state of permanent media repression, a situation that is not only appalling but also untenable," CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon said.

"The Iranian government will eventually lose the war against information, but we are saddened every day that our colleagues are paying such a terrible price."

The disputed reelection of President Mahmud Ahmadinejad in June 2009 plunged the Islamic republic into its deepest internal crisis in its three-decade history and created a rift within the ruling establishment.

Reformist opposition leaders and their supporters say the poll was rigged to secure Ahmadinejad's reelection, an allegation the authorities deny.

Hard-liners have accused opposition leaders Mir Hossein Musavi and Mehdi Karrubi of inciting unrest and called them "enemies of God" -- a crime punishable by death under Iran's Islamic law. Add a comment

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Iranian president, has accused the US of playing a "double game" in Afghanistan, following talks in the country with his counterpart Hamid Karzai.

The accusation, made in the capital Kabul on Wednesday, was the same as that made against Iran by Robert Gates, the US defence secretary, on a trip to Afghanistan this week.

Asked at a news conference with Karzai about Gates' comments, Ahmadinejad responded: "The question is what are you [Gates and troops] doing here in this region?

"You are 12,000km away on the other side the of the world. What are you doing here? This is a serious question.

"They are not successful in their fight against terrorists, because they are playing a double game. They themselves created this excuse of terrorism themselves, and now they say that they want to stop them. It is not possible.

"The fight against terrorism is not a military one it requires the work of intelligence, through respecting nations and to separate people from terrorists."

'Double dealing'

While on a three-day visit to assess a US and Nato troop increase in the country, Gates had said that Tehran is "double dealing" in Afghanistan by stating that they are a good neighbour to Kabul while providing "low level support" to the Taliban.

Gates was on the last day of his visit in Afghanistan when Ahmadinejad arrived on Wednesday.

Ahmadinejad and Karzai had met to talk about "bilateral relations between the two countries and expansion of economic relations between the two countries", Siamak Hirawi, Karzai's spokesman, said.

Common concerns
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