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19 Oct 2009 10:16 am

It Will Come Out In The End

Greenwald follows the latest twist in the Binyam Mohamed case, where the British High Court has ordered the full details of Mohamed's torture released. What we may soon find out:

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. Another source familiar with the case said: "British intelligence officers knew about the torture and didn't do anything about it. They supplied information to the Americans and the Moroccans. They supplied questions, they supplied photographs. There is evidence of all of that." 

Greenwald has a thorough, must-read account of the case:

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. War crimes can never stay hidden for long. It's only a matter of time before all of this evidence comes out one way or the other, and when it does, those who worked so vigorously to keep it concealed will be rightly judged to have been complicit in its cover-up.

I guess you could argue that by letting the courts reveal all this, while acting as a good faith defender of the Bush policy, Obama gets the evidence out there while minimizing the political fall-out for him. More of that mushy steel I was talking about. But on torture, mushy steel can mean retroactive complicity.

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