Score One Against Torture

Recall the torture case of Binyam Mohammed which resulted in a threat from the Bush Administration to withhold intelligence from the British if they released documents describing that torture.

Until yesterday, all of that caused the British High Court to continue to conceal those paragraphs based on the insistence from the British Foreign Minister that the Obama administration was re-iterating the same threats made by the Bush administration. Yesterday, in a 38-page decision , the Court reversed itself, and ruled that these paragraphs detailing Mohamed's torture should be publicly disclosed. It did so by making clear that, in essence, it simply did not believe that the U.S. would meaningfully reduce intelligence sharing; understood the Obama statements to be made at the request of British officials as a meaning of justifying ongoing concealment; interpreted the Obama administration to say only that disclosure "could" lead to reductions in intelligence-sharing, not that it "would"; and, most of all, that there are vital public interests that outweigh the minimal risk that the U.S. would withhold evidence of a terrorist plot from Britain as punishment for disclosure.

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As a result, the British High Court -- pending the results of one final appeal -- will release to the world those seven paragraphs, detailing what the CIA itself told British intelligence agents was done to Binyam Mohamed.

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All of this highlights two vital points: (1) the extent to which the Obama administration has been willing to go to cover up evidence of the Bush administration's torture regime; when I interviewed Mohamed's lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, in April, he made clear that these threats were part of a joint cover-up between the U.S. and Britain; and (2) the way in which American citizens are forced to rely on the institutions in foreign countries -- British courts and Spanish prosecutors -- to learn about what our own government has done.

  Glenn Greenwald

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, "is very far down the list of things they did," the official said.

  UK Telegraph