and continuing rendition? Looks like a protection racket to keep Bush out of war crimes tribunal.

Here's one of those articles from the Daily Record, entitled "US accused of blackmailing Britain into covering up torture of suspect". Whether it was a direct threat or just some kind of inappropriate intervention by Obama, it was wrong. What does any government have to fear by sunshine on practices unless they're trying to protect those who engaged in torture?

Two judges ruled they would not make documents on the case of Binyam Mohamed public - because the US had threatened to withdraw intelligence-sharing if details were released.

But they said the documents "give rise to an arguable case of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment".

And they disclosed that a British intelligence official may have been present - and supplied questions - when Ethiopian-born Mohamed, 31, alleges he was tortured.

Chris Floyd talks about how, yesterday, the Bush and Obama administrations asked (and that's putting it mildly) the UK government to

....quash evidence of the torture of a UK resident held captive in the American concentration camp on Guantanamo Bay. The judges said that the Bush-Obama officials threatened to stop sharing intelligence about terrorist threats against Britain unless the Brits played ball and stopped court hearings in the case of Binyam Mohamed.

Given this grave threat to British lives, the clearly angry judges said they had no choice but to stop the proceedings after the extraordinary intervention of UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who delivered the U.S. ultimatum. Once the story broke, the unctuous Miliband denied that his American masters had issued a direct threat. But the judges -- stalwart even stodgy Establishment figures both -- were clear about what had happened

Here's the BBC article about it.   That and this article ask why the United States should be involving themselves in business conducted by UK courts.

from the Guardian

The ruling, studded with thinly disguised attacks on the attitude of the foreign secretary and the American authorities, came after the judges last year invited the Guardian and other media groups to overturn Miliband's refusal to disclose information in the documents given to him by the US. In a telling passage, the judges said: "Given [the documents'] source and detail, they would ... amount to powerful evidence". None of the contents at issue could possibly be described as sensitive US intelligence, they said.

In further stinging comments they said: "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." The judges said yesterday: "It is plainly right that the details of the admissions in relation to the treatment of [Mohamed] as reported by officials of the United States government should be brought into the public domain."

They urged the Obama administration to reconsider the US position and also said that parliament's intelligence and security select committee must investigate the case in line with extended powers the committee had been granted by Gordon Brown. But the judges noted that the committee meets in private and the prime minister can censor its reports.

But what did Obama do? Thanked the UK government for keeping the torture secret.

And what about rendition? The LA Times shows that Obama is going to continue the despicable practice of doing so.

Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

Current and former U.S. intelligence officials said that the rendition program might be poised to play an expanded role going forward because it was the main remaining mechanism -- aside from Predator missile strikes -- for taking suspected terrorists off the street.

The rendition program became a source of embarrassment for the CIA, and a target of international scorn, as details emerged in recent years of botched captures, mistaken identities and allegations that prisoners were turned over to countries where they were tortured.

The European Parliament condemned renditions as "an illegal instrument used by the United States." Prisoners swept up in the program have sued the CIA as well as a Boeing Co. subsidiary accused of working with the agency on dozens of rendition flights.

Obama? He thinks renditions are just fine. So much for democracy and the rule of law.

P.S. I've been slowly starting to read The Gulag Achipeligo, about the Russian government sweeping people off the streets, without charges and then putting them in prison for years without benefit of trial. ... Remind of anything?