The Guardian reports:

US threats mean evidence of British resident’s Guantánamo torture must stay secret, judges rule

The US government obviously has blackmailed the UK into not releasing details about Guantanamo torture and threatened the country with such dire consequences that UK judges ruled evidence of torture must remain secret due to the severity of the consequences for Britain’s safety,



Here’s the same story from The Times The Telegraph The Independent

The Independent has the most extensive quotes from the ruling:

“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. “We had no reason … to anticipate there would be made a threat of the gravity of the kind made by the United States Government that it would reconsider its intelligence sharing relationship, when all the considerations in relation to open justice pointed to us providing a limited but important summary of the reports.” In another part of the ruling, the judges said they had been informed by lawyers for Foreign Secretary David Miliband that the threat to withdraw co-operation remained even under President Barack Obama’s new administration.

I was wondering how long it took until I got mad at President Obama. It didn’t take long. I still give him the it’s-the-first-100-days-and-you-can’t-do-everything-at-once benefit of the doubt, but only just. This is not the kind of foreign policy I expect and President Obama promised. This gag order must go.