Not change I can believe in: Torture cover-ups edition
February 13, 2009
The U.S. is presently continuing to blackmail the U.K. by threatening to withhold intelligence information if they reveal details on how we tortured one of their citizens, Binyam Mohammed.
Details of how the “terrorist” detainee was allegedly tortured — and what UK intelligence services knew about it — must remain secret because of the American threats, the High Court ruled yesterday.
Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said lawyers for the Foreign Secretary had told them that the threat by the US still applied under President Obama. Oppostion MPs accused the Government of giving in to blackmail.
The disclosure that the US has threatened to re-evaluate sharing intelligence with Britain came only 24 hours after Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, lavished praise on the special relationship between the two countries.
But that’s not the only problem, the government is still claiming the State Secret doctrine to protect us against Binyam Mohammed’s lawsuit against Boeing for participating in his CIA rendering. David Luban over at Balkinazation makes the solid point that if you cover it up, you own it and rightly dismisses the idea that anything that embarrasses the government should be a state secret.
Yglesias bears the good news that Rep. Delahunt is calling for the release of the information. Similarly Paisley Dodds of the AP reports that the Brits are going to Gitmo with the likely result of freeing Mohammed in the near future. Even so, I plan on raising these issues every time I hear it for reasons that Ta-Nehisi Coates elaborates:
But implicitly supporting people who would take a razor to man's genitals, is, by the lights of Obama's own campaign rhetoric, disgraceful. Andrew thinks we should slow down, given that we don't know how it all will shake out. I think there may be something to that. But I also think there's something to raising the volume, to making it sure this doesn't slip through the cracks while the country is focused on the [economy].