Mafia tactics? You betcha.

Under the woebegone previous administration, freedom meant lying and gagging. (emphasis added)

U.S. authorities asked a Guantanamo Bay detainee to drop allegations of torture and agree not to speak publicly about his ordeal in exchange for his freedom, according to British court documents.

A ruling by two British High Court judges, issued in October but released only on Monday, said the U.S. offered former detainee Binyam Mohamed a plea bargain last year - six years after he was first detained as an enemy combatant.

It was the first time details of the plea bargain offer were made public. The ruling said U.S. military prosecutors also asked that Mohamed plead guilty to two charges, accept a three-year sentence and agree to testify against other suspected terrorists.

[snip]

He was freed in February after months of negotiation between the U.S. and Britain. All charges against him were dropped last year.

Mohamed refused to agree to any deal that prevented him from discussing his treatment, Lord Justice John Thomas and Mr. Justice David Lloyd Jones said in the ruling.

“He wanted it to be made clear to the world what had happened and how he has been treated by the United States government since April 2002,” Thomas said in the ruling.

[snip]

Issuing a judgment on the case in February, Thomas said there was evidence to show Mohamed was tortured, but that the documents could not be made public because of the British government’s national security concerns. Source

More:

The High Court ruling, which was made Oct. 22 but hadn’t been published previously because of agreements covering classified information between the U.S. and Britain, said that Mohamed was asked to agree to a plea “in circumstances where there are no pending charges against him, where he has no idea how any new charges against him will be framed and where he is not to receive sight” of exculpatory evidence against him.

[snip]

Lord Peter Goldsmith, the British attorney general in the Labor government under former Prime Minister Tony Blair from 2001 to 2007, said Monday that he “did not know there were any attempts to silence the detainees.” If clear evidence of such attempts exists, it suggests that “the people who had been detaining him had something to hide,” Goldsmith said. Source