by Jacob Laksin
If sensationalist press reports are to be believed, the US and UK governments have just been caught covering up “torture.” Such has been the media’s framing of the British government’s release yesterday of a seven-paragraph intelligence summary compiled by the British High Court and detailing the CIA’s treatment of Ethiopian-born British citizen Binyam Mohamed, an al-Qaeda operative and former Guantanamo Bay detainee.
That the U.S. and U.K. both opposed the release of the seven paragraphs, which was ordered by the British Court of Appeal, has been touted by Mohamed’s lawyers and supporters as evidence of their complicity in torture. Mohamed himself has long made that claim, portraying himself as the victim of a systematic torture policy “orchestrated by the United States government” with the complicity of its British ally.
