Obama Administration Still Fighting Release of Torture Evidence

This case has dropped a off the radar screen lately, but Bob Egelko at the San Francisco Chronicle today reminds us that the Obama administration is still fighting on three different fronts release of information that would likely show that U.S. officials tortured British former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.

Mohamed is one of the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against Jeppesen Dataplan, the Boeing subsidiary that allegedly helped the CIA conduct “extraordinary renditions” of terror suspects to foreign countries to be tortured. As I reported back in June, the Obama Justice Department has asked the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to re-hear the case after the court ordered that it can continue, despite the administration’s assertion of the “state secrets privilege.”

Most recently, the Chronicle notes, a British government lawyer told the U.K. High Court of Justice last month “that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had threatened to limit U.S. intelligence-sharing with Great Britain if the court disclosed details of Mohamed’s treatment in Guantanamo.”

A transcript of the British court’s July 29 hearing reveals that Lord Justice John Thomas rejected that argument, saying there was “nothing in the paragraphs (about the U.S. government’s treatment of Mohamed) that could conceivably identify anything that is of a national security interest.”