BRITAIN is asking the CIA to interrogate its terror suspects held at a network of secret detention centres to help to identify the masterminds behind the London bombings.

Investigators need to discover who first came up with the plan for suicide attacks on London’s transport system, and if more bombings are imminent.

For that sort of information Britain’s security agencies have turned to their US counterparts and the most closely guarded captives on Earth. Some of al-Qaeda’s most notorious figures are being interrogated in underground jails or on warships beyond the reach of US or international law.

Evidence from these so called “ghost prisoners” has reportedly helped to thwart terror attacks in Britain and investigators believe that some of those in CIA hands may have crucial information about events in London.

One target is al-Qaeda’s operations commander, Abu Faraj al Liby, who has not been seen since a photograph of his bruised and bloodied face was shown after he was seized in Pakistan in May 2004 and handed over to the US. Two months earlier he orchestrated a terror meeting in a remote corner of Pakistan to plot future attacks.

Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, has said that Britain cannot ignore intelligence from prisoners whom civil liberty groups complain have been subjected to torture.

Human rights groups and the Red Cross have condemned this global chain of secret prisons while the United Nations says that it is going to investigate America’s abuse of its “high value” detainees who have not been seen or heard of since their capture.

A senior officer close to the London investigation said: “We obviously need to know what threat remains and we are asking all our international allies for help even if the standards of their interrogation methods are not as scrupulous as our own. Needs must, I fear.”

Amnesty says that Britain should not be using intelligence obtained from these ghost prisoners. Mike Blakemore, its UK media director, said: “The UK authorities must do their utmost to prevent any repeat of the July 7 bombings and to bring those responsible to justice, but agreeing to the extraction of information from people held in secret and illegal detention is a step too far.

“Illegal detention is the slippery slope to torture and it is vital that the London bombings investigation does not make use of ‘torture evidence’.

“Since September 11, 2001, we have repeatedly raised our concern with the US authorities that ‘ghost detainees’ are being held in secret detention centres around the world. These ‘secret Guantanamos’ should be opened up and prisoners either properly charged or released.”

Human Rights First has compiled a dossier on 24 of these secret centres and reveals how the CIA is operating its own airline to shift terror suspects across the world.

President Bush says he doesn’t know where these prisoners are being held but insists that lives have been saved, including many in Britain, because of information obtained from al-Qaeda figures in custody.

The abuse in these jails is worse than anything witnessed in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo Bay, sources say. These men are held for years in solitary confinement and allowed no contact with family or the Red Cross. One centre is known as “the pit” because suspects spend their entire time underground.

Investigators for civil rights groups in the US say that the CIA use guards speaking the same dialect to make a detainee believe he is being held in a certain Arab speaking country.

After a few weeks the detainee is blindfolded, drugged and flown around in a plane for hours before he is taken to what he thinks is a different location but is back to the same pit with a different set of interrogators in a changed surround.

There is said to be a torture centre on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean where two navy prison ships ferry suspects in and out.

The CIA reportedly has other sites in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Jordan and Iraq, though high-value detainees will have no idea where they are and are kept out of sight of other prisoners.Suspects who are not so important to the CIA are moved to jails in Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, all countries with records of practising torture. The US describes this as “rendition”.

The White House says these “unlawful combatants” in the war on terror are not covered by the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war, which prohibits “violence to life and person, cruel treatment and torture”. The International Red Cross has a list of 36 individuals almost exclusively high-value detainees, that the US admits it is holding but will not say where.

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