There is a vital development -- a new ruling from the British High Court -- in a story about which I've written many times before: the extraordinary joint British/U.S. effort to cover up the brutal torture which Binyam Mohamed suffered at the hands of the CIA while in Pakistan and while he was "rendered" by the U.S. to various countries. While Mohamed, a British resident, was in American custody, the CIA told British intelligence agents exactly what was done to him, and those British agents recorded what they were told in various memos. Last year, the British High Court ruled that Mohamed -- who was then at Guantanamo -- had the right to obtain those documents from the British intelligence service in order to prove that statements he made to the CIA were the by-product of coercion.
The High Court's original ruling in Mohamed's favor contained seven paragraphs which described the torture to which Mohamed was subjected. It has been previously reported that those paragraphs contain descriptions of abuse so brutal that not even our own American media could dispute that it constitutes "torture":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.
Read the rest of the story. The Bush administration was basically threatening the British that they would not tell them if they knew that someone was planning terror attacks on Britain if they released these documents. As bad as that is, it was rather par for the course for Bush. But the Obama administration, Nobel Peace Prize and all, continued the threats. And the British High Court has finally called their bluff. Obama may not want to talk about the past, but it's not going to matter if the rest of the world does.
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