Craig Murray writes:

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It is ludicrous that Kenneth Clarke has announced that the Gibson Inquiry cannot go ahead because of the Metropolitan Police inquiry into rendition and torture anent Libya, when the Leveson Inquiry continues despite the long-running and delberately ineffective police investigations into News International.

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Scotland Yard stated that there is no investigation into complicity with rendition and torture in Libya.

USA Today reports.

Military commanders in Afghanistan have stopped making public the number of allied troops killed by Afghan soldiers and police, a measure of the trustworthiness of a force that is to take over security from U.S.-led forces.

The change in policy comes after at least three allied troops have been killed by the Afghan troops they trained in the past month and follows what appears to be the deadliest year of the war for NATO trainers at the hands of their Afghan counterparts.

Craig Murray writes.

The French government has suspended training for Afghan forces after four of their troops were killed by an Afghan soldier under training. Extraordinarily, that makes eight NATO troops killed by their trainees in 2012 already.

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But do not worry: NATO have come up with a brilliant and effective policy response to this problem. They are suppressing statistics on NATO personnel killed or wounded by Afghan army and police personnel. So that's alright, then.

Guardian report.

The judge-led inquiry into allegations of British collusion in the torture of detainees has been abandoned for the time being, Ken Clarke has announced.

Laura Rozen on her Yahoo! news blog.

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In response to questions about the various theories flying about, several current and former American officials told Yahoo News Sunday on condition of anonymity that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak had last month issued a request to the Pentagon that the exercise be postponed. The United States did not seek the delay--and American sources privately voiced concern that the Israeli request for a postponement of the exercise could be read as a potential warning sign that Israel is leaving its options open to conduct a preemptive strike on Iran's nuclear facilities in the spring. Thus, the concern went, it may not want 5,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Israel in April and May, as had been scheduled for the exercise.

Moazzam Begg in the Guardian's Comment is free.

The case of Belhaj -- who was surrounded by men kissing his hands and forehead as a people's liberator (shortly after the visits of David Cameron, Nicolas Sarkozy and Recep Tayyip Erdogan) when I met him -- is even more embarrassing for the British government. He, like Saadi, was offered up as a gift to Gaddafi -- the new ally in the "war on terror" back then -- but used skills gained on the battlefields of Afghanistan to lead the rebels in Tripoli to victory as a key leader of the National Transitional Council. The evidence, unlike in the cases of the Guantánamo prisoners, is not hidden in the secret intelligence files of the CIA or MI5/6 that can never be accessed due to "national security" excuses. The smoking gun was uncovered, paradoxically, by western-backed rebels who stormed the headquarters of the Libyan mukhabarat (intelligence); a Human Rights Watch researcher found documents there that revealed clear and friendly communication between Britain and Libya which named Saadi and Belhaj as offerings to help bring Gaddafi in from the cold.