As I wrote on Friday, if Britain's high court ruling stands, documents detailing the torture of Ethiopian national and former Gitmo detainee Binyam Mohamed at the hands of Moroccan authorities will come to light. Both the U.S. and British governments have been attempting to keep this information under wraps because, Mohamed claims, of their joint involvement in Mohamed's extraordinary rendition to Morocco, which is at the center of a lawsuit filed by Mohamed (as well as several other plaintiffs) against Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan.
The U.S. had reportedly warned Britain against disclosure, and the State Department reacted angrily to the news. David Milliband, Britain's foreign secretary, said that "[i]t remains my assessment that the consequence of the court's judgment today, if left unchallenged, will be a restriction on what is shared with us." The British government is appealing the ruling.
The revelation is also somewhat awkward for Britain's intelligence service director general, Jonathan Evans, since the day of the ruling Evans declared in a speech at Bristol University that the UK doesn't get involved in this sort of thing:
I can say quite clearly that the security service does not torture people, nor do we collude in torture or solicit others to torture people on our behalf...That is a very clear and long established principle.
Sadly, it doesn't appear to be any more true than when George W. Bush said, "This government does not torture people"--which is why both governments are fighting the disclosure of the documents, even to the point where the U.K. and the U.S. are claiming they won't share intelligence with each other--a rhetorical stunt that approaches blackmail. They seem to be saying, unless you agree to help us cover up our wrongdoing, we won't do our best to prevent terrorist attacks.
I don't think that's a very credible threat from either side, but either way it's clear that both governments are unhappy about the pending disclosure--for one thing, it could completely undermine the U.S. argument in the Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan case--that the details of Mohamed's rendition must be kept secret for national security reasons.
Meanwhile, a fair question is whether or not the United States has put effective safeguards in place to prevent the abuse of detainees we release to other countries in the future--especially since, because Congress has all but ensured no former detainees will be resettled in the U.S., counterterrorism official John Brennan suggested in August that the U.S. would have to rely more on sending detainees to foreign nations. The Department of Justice announced later that month that they had "clarified" and "strengthened" the process of receiving "assurances" from other countries that detainees would be treated humanely, and developed a better way to ensure those promises are kept.
Ultimately we'll just have to see.
-- A. Serwer
