Why do I agree with Judiciary Committee chairman Patrick Leahy when he says we should create a new Church Committee or South Africa-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission to examine the crimes of the Bush administration? This is why.
But The Daily Telegraph reported over the weekend that the documents actually “contained details of how British intelligence officers supplied information to [Mohamed’s] captors and contributed questions while he was brutally tortured.” In fact, it was British officials, not the Americans, who pressured Foreign Secretary David Miliband “to do nothing that would leave serving MI6 officers open to prosecution.” According to the Telegraph’s sources, the documents describe particularly gruesome interrogation tactics:
The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,” the official said.
Another source familiar with the case said: “British intelligence officers knew about the torture and didn’t do anything about it.”
“It is very clear who stands to be embarrassed by this and who is being protected by this secrecy. It is not the Americans, it is Labour ministers,” former shadow home secretary David Davis said. But one unnamed U.S. House Judiciary Committee member told the Telegraph that if President Obama “doesn’t act we could hold a hearing or write to subpoena the documents. We need to know what’s in those documents.”
Consider the following, do you agree with the bolded section?
David Davis, the former shadow home secretary who first highlighted the case, said: “What has become clear is that the information being held back is not protecting the American government who have made a clean breast of their involvement in torture, but the British government, where at least two cabinet ministers have denied any complicity whatsoever.
From the British perspective, I understand why they are upset with their government for trying to hide under Dick Cheney’s skirt, but when in the hell did the American government make ‘a clean breast of their involvement’ in mutilating our prisoners’ genitals with scalpels? Do you recall when that happened? I don’t recall that.
If that happened, and I desperately want to believe that it did not, then I want Bush and Cheney in prison. Either way, we need to know.
