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Joe Vitus wrote:

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Andrew Sullivan notes this article from the BBC, reporting on threats made by the U.S. to punish Britain if British courts disclose what was done to one of its citizens, Binyam Mohamed, a former Guantanamo detainee who is suing the British Government for its complicity in his torture. British judges "said they wanted the full details of the alleged torture to be published in the interests of safeguarding the rule of law, free speech and democratic accountability" -- what are those strange things? -- but decided not to do so because it was "persuaded that it was not in the public interest to publish those details as the US government could then inflict on the citizens of the United Kingdom a very considerable increase in the dangers they face at a time when a serious terrorist threat still pertains."

So not only has our own Government erected an impenetrable wall of secrecy around what it has done, but is demanding that other countries do the same, upon threat of being punished. As Sullivan said: "Torture is a cancer. It spreads through the legal system until it destroys the integrity of all of it. It will also destroy alliances if allowed to spread. The scale of that destruction has yet to be measured or understood. Obama has now drawn a line under it. But that is only the start of a process of recovery."

UPDATE:
Relating to the last item, the Obama administration just actually praised Britain for succumbing to pressure and continuing to conceal details of what happened to Binyam Mohamed at the hands of the U.S. Government. The administration issued this self-evidently disturbing statement (h/t Pedinska):

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In a statement, the White House said it "thanked the UK government for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security information".

It added that this would "preserve the long-standing intelligence sharing relationship that enables both countries to protect their citizens".
The British Government is denying the judges' assertion that the U.S. Government threatened to cut off intelligence sharing with Britain if it disclosed these facts, but the Obama administration's statement -- that Britain's willingness to conceal these facts would "preserve the long-standing intelligence sharing relationship that enables both countries to protect their citizens" -- strongly suggests that this is exactly what the U.S. was threatening to do.

The ACLU's Executive Director, Anthony Romero, wrote a letter to Hillary Clinton (.pdf) requesting clarification of the Obama administration's position and, in that letter, he quoted the scathing language from the British court regarding the U.S.'s demand that these facts be kept concealed:

Romero then issued this statement:

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Indeed we did not consider that a democracy [the United States] governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a sumnary of the evidence contained in reports by its own officials...relevant to allegations of torture, and cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, politically embarrassing though it might be.

We had no reason...to anticipate there would be made a threat of the gravity of the kind made by the United States Government that it would reconsider its intelligence-sharing relationship, when all the considerations in relation to open justice pointed to us providing a limited but important summary of the reports.

Hope is flickering. The Obama administration's position is not change. It is more of the same. This represents a complete turn-around and undermining of the restoration of the rule of law. The new American administration shouldn't be complicit in hiding the abuses of its predecessors.

I'd like to hear the Obama administration's rationale for this behavior, but it's very difficult to think of anything that could possibly justify it.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/

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