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Trouble In The Alliance

Eli Lake has this knack for ferreting out little nuggets of information that illumine the portentous and pretentious in state policy with regard to torture. The Obama administration wants to make everything--more or less--public (which, by the way, I don't.) But it doesn't want any other government, even the Brits, to do it for them. And that's the case even if it would be the High Court of Justice doing the releasing of the information about the terrorist being tortured in Guantanamo. 

The ultimate consequence of London spilling what Washington doesn't want it to spill could be, as Lake points out, " curtailing Anglo-American intelligence sharing." That's a big price for anything. But the moralists are caught in a quagmire of their own making. The alleged terrorist, Binyam Mohamed, was released from Guantanamo in February and has now sued in England for information about having been tortured by the U.S. and, in rendition, by Pakistan and Morocco.

"The Metropolitan Police of London is investigating whether Mr. Mohamed was tortured while in American custody."