Threatening to not share intelligence -- putting the British public at risk --
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/30/mohamed/index.html">just doesn't make any sense.
What could possibly justify this full-scale joint effort by the Obama administration and the British government to cover-up evidence of Mohamed's torture? In April, when I interviewed one of Mohamed's lawyers, Clive Stafford Smith, he pointed out:
Covering up evidence of torture is a criminal offense for which you can go to prison here in Britain, and I imagine in the US but I'm not quite sure about that. And the idea that the British government would conspire with the US or be threatened by the US to do this is again an independent violation of the law.
It's one thing to try to impede prosecutions of those responsible for torture by invoking the inspiring mantra that we Must Look to the Future, Not the Past. It's another thing entirely to actively cover-up evidence of that torture and block the victims from their day in court. There is now a very active controversy over exactly what role the Obama administration and British government is each playing in the issuance of these extraordinary threats. But there is no doubt that both governments are actively attempting to keep this evidence concealed.
In February, Andrew Sullivan wrote about the Mohamed case: "with each decision to cover for their predecessors, the Obamaites become retroactively complicit in them." In May, Sullivan wrote:
Slowly but surely, Obama is owning the cover-up of his predecessors' war crimes. But covering up war crimes, refusing to prosecute them, promoting those associated with them, and suppressing evidence of them are themselves violations of Geneva and the UN Convention. So Cheney begins to successfully coopt his successor.
This is why you can't just get behind the wheel and "look
away forward." When your trunk is full of war criminal horrors, you're just driving the torture getaway car.
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