A British prisoner in Guantanamo Bay, Binyam Mohamed, is currently in the process of trying to prove to the High Court that any confessions he made between his detainment in 2002 and his arrival at Gitmo in 2004 were due to torture, which he apparently started receiving in 2002 at the hands of the MI5. To that end, Mohamed's lawyers demanded to see all the details of his interrogation during that two-year time span.
In another great move of isolation that reeks of a cornered cat, a legal adviser from the US State Department threatened relations outright with the best ally the US had ever since this whole damn thing began:
In an email to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which was sent on to the court, Stephen Mathias, a legal adviser to the US state department, said that the disclosure of information would cause "serious and lasting damage to the US-UK intelligence-sharing relationship and thus the national security of the UK, and the aggressive and unprecedented intervention in the apparently functioning adjudicatory processes of a longtime ally of the UK, in contravention of well-established principles of international comity."I think it's pretty clear that the powers that be do not want any part of that interrogation to be read aloud in court, especially in a court that the US has no jurisdiction or control over. But here's what I don't get:
If the whole purpose of this court case is to prove whether or not someone was tortured, and everything that the US has done since September 2001 has been "completely justified", and "we don't torture", then what's the problem?
I mean... if we don't torture, then those interrogation records shouldn't contain anything juicy that would make the State Department want to tell the UK to STFU.
RIGHT?
I don't think the UK has to worry at all about Mathias' threat, especially considering that the "serious and lasting damage" to the relationship can only last until January.
[H/T to C&L]
