In May, The Washington Times' Eli Lake reported that an extraordinary letter sent to the British by the Obama administration proved that "the Obama administration
it may curtail Anglo-American intelligence sharing if the British High Court discloses new details of the treatment of a former Guantanamo detainee." That same day, I obtained the court documents filed by the British Government (.pdf) which purported to include that letter sent by the Obama administration, and I wrote about that letter here.
The letter explicitly threatened that the U.S. would cut off intelligence-sharing with the British in the event of disclosure of these torture facts by the British court. The letter expressly warned that such action "could reasonably be expected to cause serious damage to the United Kingdom's national security" and "it is almost certain that the United Kingdom's ability to identify and arrest suspected terrorists and to disrupt terrorist plots would be severely hampered." In other words: if you let your courts describe how we tortured Mohamed -- even if your laws, your treaty obligations and decades-old international law compel such disclosure -- we may purposely leave your citizens vulnerable to future terrorist attacks by withholding information we obtain about terrorist plots aimed at your country.
New facts emerged yesterday about the threats issued by the Obama administration. Back in February, the British Foreign Minster, David Miliband, denied that he was explicitly threatened by the Bush administration. But now, The Guardian reports that -- at least according to Miliband -- threats were issued by the Obama administration not only in the form of that previously disclosed letter, but also personally by Hillary Clinton in a May meeting with him and other British officials:
Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, personally intervened to suppress evidence of CIA collusion in the torture of a British resident, the high court heard today. . . . David Miliband, the foreign secretary, has repeatedly told the court that the US would stop sharing intelligence with the UK if the CIA material was published. . . Today, it heard how Miliband met Clinton in Washington on 12 May this year.
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http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/30/mohamed/index.html
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