Thursday, January 10, 2013 at 8:05 | Jonathan Singerton in EA Global, Europe and Russia, UK and Ireland 
Given all the tensions between Russia and Britain, how can there be a thaw in the frozen diplomatic relations?
The answer is simple.
Gas --- and the company BP.
Photo: Mark Wilson (Getty)A top-secret document revealing how MI6 and MI5 officers were allowed to extract information from prisoners being illegally tortured overseas has been seen by the Guardian.
The interrogation policy --- details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK's role in torture and rendition --- instructed senior intelligence officers to weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer. It was operated by the British government for almost a decade.
A copy of the secret policy showed senior intelligence officers and ministers feared the British public could be at greater risk of a terrorist attack if Islamists became aware of its existence.
On 6 May 2009, representatives from the State Department and Department of Defense hosted officials from Britain's Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) "to discuss progress on [Britain's] national legislation implementing the Convention on Cluster Munitions ".
Ostensibly, the British delegation's "primary focus at this meeting was to inform Washington of an accelerated date for the request of the removal of U.S. munitions from UK territory". In fact, the two sides were going to discuss an arrangement to allow the Americans to maintain the storage and transit of cluster bombs in that territory.
The solution? The Foreign Office, led by David Miliband, established "temporary exceptions" for the US to store the bombs on a "case-by-case" basis for specific military operations, such as those in Afghanistan.
And in the May 2009 meeting, there was a neat twist. The Foreign Office delegation had an arrangement to keep the deal with the Americans a secret from the British Parliament....
