Over the weekend, the government has identified another way to embarrass itself.

Karen Steyn is the barrister representing David Miliband, who has been arguing that we must suppress evidence of torture in the case of Binyam Mohamed. On Saturday, the high court judges sent the foreign secretary a transcript of their interrogation of Steyn for him to confirm in writing whether he really means what she says.

The issue at stake is whether the government really wants to suppress seven paragraphs that apparently include American admissions that they tortured Mohamed. First, Steyn confirmed that the material that she wanted suppressed had no intelligence value - it did not "conceivably identify anything that is of a national security interest", it simply identified criminal acts of torture.

Second, Steyn confirmed that the US had "threatened" the UK with sanctions if the material was released, though she did not like the word: "It is entirely right," she said, "there has been that explicit statement of consequences."

Those inevitable consequences are that the US will withhold intelligence information. Lord Justice Thomas explained that this "means, in the vernacular, [an increased] risk to the men, women and children of this country from terrorist attack".

So we are clear, let me translate into the vernacular what we will know if Miliband bows to these threats. Under British law it is a criminal offence to suppress evidence of torture. The US has told Britain that it must commit this crime, and help cover up American crimes, or the US will ensure that innocent British citizens are more likely to die in a terrorist attack. The British government is without moral principle and has been cowed by these illegal American threats.

There clearly comes a time when even politicians have to show a little moral fibre. Miliband must understand that there are "consequences" when we choose to cover up evidence of torture as well: those consequences will probably be the election of a new government.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2009/aug/03/torture-binyam-mohamed-miliband

and even darker .....

The torture and abuse of the child detainee, Mohammed Jawad, continues up to on or about June 2, 2008 when he was "beaten, kicked, and pepper-sprayed while he was on the ground with his feet and hands in shackles, for allegedly not comply with guards' instructions. Fifteen days later, there were still visible marks consistent with physical abuse on his body, including his arms, knees, shoulder, forehead, and ribs."(24)

How the Obama administration can possibly defend building a criminal case against Mohammed Jawad, given that he was under 18 years-old at the time of his arrest and has endured endless years of torture and abuse at the hands of the U.S. government, raises serious questions about ethical and political integrity of this government and its alleged commitment for human rights.

The case against this young man is so weak that Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle has not only recently accused the government of "dragging [the case] out for no good reason," but also expressed alarm at how weak the government's case was, stating in a refusal to give them an extension to amass new evidence against Jawad, "You'd better go consult real quick with the powers that be, because this is a case that's been screaming at everybody for years. This case is an outrage to me.... I am not going to sit up here and wait for you to come up with new evidence at this late hour.... This case is in shambles."(25) On July 30, 2009, Judge Huvelle ordered the Obama administration to release Jawad by late August. She stated "After this horrible, long, tortured history, I hope the government will succeed in getting him back home.... Enough has been imposed on this young man to date."(26)

The New York Times reported, in what can only be interpreted as another example of bad faith on the part of the Obama administration, that the Justice Department responded to Judge Huvelle's ruling by suggesting that "they were studying whether to file civilian criminal charges against Mr. Jawad. If they do, officials say, he could be transferred to the United States to face charges, instead of being sent to Afghanistan, where his lawyers say he would be released to his mother."(27)

This response goes to the heart of the contradiction between Obama as an iconic symbol of a more democratic and hopeful future and the reality of an administration that is capable of reproducing some of the worst policies of the Bush administration.

Jawad's case is about more than legal incompetence, it is also about the descent into the "dark side," where a culture of cruelty reigns and the law is on the side of the most frightening of antidemocratic practices, pointing to a society in which terror becomes as totalizing as the loss of any sense of ethical responsibility. Torture of this type, especially of a child, would appear to have more in common with the techniques used by the Gestapo, Pol Pot, the Pinochet thugs in Chile, and the military junta in Argentina in the 1970s rather than with the United States - or at least the democratic country the United States has historically claimed to be.

http://www.truthout.org/080309A?n

so what .....

There cannot be a set of legal rules applicable to other nations and citizens but to which America need not adhere. To regain its moral legitimacy, American must formally recognize that some of its official post-9/11 practices were unlawful.

A truth commission composed of Americans and non-Americans would help assure that the inquiry would be fair and free of political grandstanding. There is good precedent by the Carnegie Foundation. In the 1940s to the Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal studied the American race problem.Myrdhal's report proved influential when the US Supreme Court came to rule on school segregation in 1954.

That there will be a day of historical reckoning is beyond doubt. In France the reckoning took 50 years. In 1995 President Jacques Chirac formally and belatedly acknowledged "the dark hours that sullied our history and injured our traditions" admitting that the French Vichy regime government was complicit in World War II atrocities. The issue is how quickly it will come. The attorney general must find the courage to face it now.

http://informationclearinghouse.info/article23175.htm