Obama Backslides on 'State Secrets'

President Barack Obama came to office promising change and, to his credit, has already issued orders to close Guantánamo and the CIA's secret prisons and to stop the CIA's use of cruel and inhuman interrogation tactics. But in a pair of recent cases, Obama has shown a troubling unwillingness even to acknowledge the wrongs that the Bush administration committed. Both cases involve Binyam Mohammed, a Guantánamo detainee who was allegedly a victim of rendition and torture at the hands of US captors. On February 4 an English court announced that it could not disclose how US officials had interrogated Mohammed, because Washington would not let it do so, declaring the information secret. And on February 9 a Justice Department lawyer told the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that a lawsuit challenging the legality of Mohammed's treatment had to be dismissed because it touched on "state secrets." In both instances the "secret" is that we tortured suspects in the "war on terror"--a secret heard round the world, but one the Obama administration is apparently unwilling to have acknowledged in a court of law. As the British judges wrote, "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." Accountability demands open acknowledgment that serious wrongs have been committed, not inflated claims of secrecy that allow the wrongs to go unremedied.

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