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LONDON — Seven secret paragraphs detailing the alleged torture of a former Guantanamo detainee should be disclosed, a British High Court has ruled – a decision that could ignite fresh criticism of U.S. interrogation practices and raise prickly questions for the British government.

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian who moved to Britain as a teenager, was arrested in 2002 in Pakistan for using a false passport. After his arrest, he was sent to Morocco, Afghanistan and then Guantanamo in 2004. He claims the United States and Britain were complicit in his torture in Pakistan and Morocco.

In their 2008 ruling on whether to release material relating to Mohamed’s treatment while in captivity, the judges ordered the disclosure of some intelligence documents but said they were forced to keep seven paragraphs of UK-U.S. exchanges secret out of a British claim that national security could be harmed.

Lord Justice John Thomas and Justice David Lloyd Jones reversed their original ruling on Friday by saying that the public interest in disclosing the seven paragraphs was "overwhelming" and the risk to national security was not "a serious one."

Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband promised an immediate appeal, which would delay the release of the material.

"It remains my assessment that the consequence of the court’s judgment today, if left unchallenged, will be a restriction on what is shared with us," Miliband said.

Miliband has long said the intelligence exchanges originated in the United States and it was up to the U.S. to release the material.

U.S. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly criticized the British court’s decision.

"We both have a stake in ensuring that this kind of intelligence sharing continues to the fullest extent possible," Kelly told reporters in Washington.

"This has nothing to do with due process here. This has everything to do with the importance of protecting sensitive national security information and protecting this confidential channel that we have with our allies. We keep this information confidential because this information is important to protect our own citizens."

The case began more than a year ago when Mohamed was facing a military trial at Guantanamo. His lawyers sued the British government for intelligence documents they said could prove that evidence against him had been gathered under torture.

But then, the U.S. charges against Mohamed were dropped, President Barack Obama took office, and Mohamed was sent back to Britain – a chain of events that led to the lawsuit in Britain becoming a larger battle for access to information.

The case has been unique – the judges have repeatedly lashed out at both the United States and the British governments for trying to conceal information while taking the extraordinary step of encouraging the media to join in the legal challenge to disclose the information.

Lawyers for Mohamed and several media organizations, including The Associated Press, argued that the public had the right to know if Britain had colluded in Mohamed’s treatment – a possible violation of several international treaties – or if America had used controversial interrogation practices.

"It cannot be suggested that information as to how officials of the U.S. government admitted treating (Binyam Mohamed) during his interrogation is information that can in any democratic society governed by the rule of law be characterized as ’secret’ or as ‘intelligence’," the judges wrote in their decision.

Mohamed said Friday’s ruling could finally allow the public to understand the depths of U.S. and UK involvement in his and other’s detention.

"The public needs to know what their government has been up to for the last seven years," the 31-year-old told the British Broadcasting Corp.

The Bush administration repeatedly refused to account for Mohamed’s whereabouts for 18 months or say whether it ordered his transfer from Pakistan to Morocco. The practice of extraordinary rendition was much criticized, in part because some prisoners were handed over to countries with documented histories of human rights abuses. Morocco was one such country, according to an Amnesty International report.

Although Obama has taken steps to distance himself from the Bush administration’s legacy by promising to close Guantanamo and end torture, fresh details about U.S. interrogation techniques and extraordinary renditions could present an unwanted headache for his young administration.

The judges said they could not "accept the contention of the Foreign Secretary that the position of the Obama administration is the same as that of the Bush Administration …." on the possibility that intelligence would be withheld should the material be disclosed.

Mohamed says he was tortured while in Pakistan, that interrogators in Morocco sliced his penis with a scalpel and brutally abused him. It isn’t clear which country the interrogators were from, but Mohamed has alleged the questions put to him could only have come from British intelligence agents.

He alleges the CIA was responsible for transferring him to Morocco, and then moving him Afghanistan and to Guantanamo in 2004.

Since his February release from Guantanamo, Mohamed has been living at an undisclosed location in Britain.

The AP was part of the legal challenge to disclose the material. Other media organizations involved included the Guardian News and Media Ltd., the British Broadcasting Corp., Times Newspapers Ltd., Independent News and Media Ltd., the Press Association, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and the Index on Censorship.

"The court did a painstaking job of weighing the real risk of harm against the high public interest in full disclosure, and came to what we’ve believed from the start was the only possible conclusion," AP associate general counsel Dave Tomlin said.

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Associated Press writers David Stringer in London and Matthew Lee in Washington, D.C., contributed to this report.

AP | PAISLEY DODDS | Friday, October 16, 2009