How many times do you have to see it? How many times must it be shoved in your face, crammed down your throat, brought down on your head like a ton of bricks, before you get the picture? When it comes to the lineaments and methods of empire — war, murder, torture, extortion, and deceit — there is no difference, none whatsoever, between the hip, cool “progressives” in Team Obama and the gaggle of militarist goons who preceded them.
The comely mask of the new regime was torn away — once again — in a scandal that exploded in Britain on Wednesday. With unprecedented harsh language, two of Britain’s high court judges revealed that both Bush and Obama officials have strong-armed the British government to quash evidence of the torture of a UK resident held captive in the American concentration camp on Guantanamo Bay. The judges said that the Bush-Obama officials threatened to stop sharing intelligence about terrorist threats against Britain unless the Brits played ball and stopped court hearings in the case of Binyam Mohamed.
Given this grave threat to British lives, the clearly angry judges said they had no choice but to stop the proceedings after the extraordinary intervention of UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who delivered the U.S. ultimatum. Once the story broke, the unctuous Miliband denied that his American masters had issued a direct threat. But the judges — stalwart even stodgy Establishment figures both — were clear about what had happened. As the Guardian and the BBC report:
The government was accused last night of hiding behind claims of a threat to national security to suppress evidence of torture by the CIA on a prisoner still held in Guantánamo Bay. An unprecedented high court ruling yesterday blamed the US, with British connivance, for keeping the “powerful evidence” secret…
Two senior judges said they were powerless to reveal the information about the torture of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident, because David Miliband, the foreign secretary, had warned the court the US was threatening to stop sharing intelligence about terrorism with the UK.
In a scathing judgment, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said the evidence, and what MI5 knew about it, must remain secret because according to Miliband, the American threats meant “the public of the United Kingdom would be put at risk”….
The 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.
…In a telling passage, the judges said: “Given (the documents’) source and detail, they would … amount to powerful evidence”. None of the contents at issue could possibly be described as sensitive US intelligence, they said.
In further stinging comments they said: “Moreover, in the light of the long history of the common law and democracy which we share with the United States, it was, in our view, very difficult to conceive that a democratically elected and accountable government could possibly have any rational objection to placing into the public domain such a summary of what its own officials reported as to how a detainee was treated by them and which made no disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters.
“Indeed we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary 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.” The judges said yesterday: “It is plainly right that the details of the admissions in relation to the treatment of (Mohamed) as reported by officials of the United States government should be brought into the public domain.”
Ah yes, but our poor stalwarts are laboring under a tragic delusion: that they are dealing with democracies “governed by the rule of law.” What they are really confronted with is an arrogant imperial power looking to protect its elites from prosecution for capital crimes, with the craven, sniveling collusion of bootlicking errand boys across the sea. If I were a British citizen — as two of my children are — I would be deeply ashamed of this display of subservience.
