US to UK: Remember, you guys are the poodles

Not sure why, but i found this story somewhat shocking. In order to squash being outed on all the nasty torture techniques they've used in Guantanamo, the US has actually blackmailed the UK by threatening to break off security-intel cooperation. The context is the legal case of Binyan Mohammed, a british resident who got the full rendition tour: kidnapped in Pakistan, moved to Morocco, back east to Afghanistan and then to Guantanamo. At issue is whether there is sufficient cause to allow him to return, unshackled, to the UK.

Snippet of a snippet from the judges' ruling:

"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."

Given all that's been released already about torture at Guantanamo, i'm at a loss in imagining what new revelations the US military has to fear, i.e. how much worse could it possibly get? The only thing i haven't heard about that totally makes my skin crawl is drawing and quartering, but i'm fairly confident we would've known about it if the marines and CIA had gone that far out of bounds. Either the British government is concocting this in order to hide their own culpability, or the US under the new administration made a conscious decision to remind the brits who is master of the enemy combatant universe.

On another note, found this set of articles about the murder of India's anti-terror chief. Interesting reading if you're looking for a slight change from Dan Brown.