The Mohamed case and the American threats

It’s difficult, without seeing the judges’ ruling, to be completely sure that the information Thomas LJ and Lloyd-Jones J would like to publish relating to the treatment of Binyam Mohamed must be published by a British court: originally disclosure was sought in the interests of Mohamed’s defence before an American military commission, but now that prosecution has been halted of course. There is also a habeas corpus application, and I’m not yet clear to what extent disclosure has been made to the American judge in that case. It may be – may be – that there has been sufficient disclosure to ensure fairness to Binyan Mohamed and that there is some good security reason for the information not to be published to all the world, or at least for the American government and court hearing the habeas corpus case, rather than our own courts, to decide whether it should be or not.

But even as I write that, I feel I’m making a far better case for the British government’s position than David Miliband himself has done. This would not be the first time the American government has appeared uncooperative in the extreme with a British court when disclosure would not, in truth, have made the security sky fall in, and I’m not satisfied either that the British government has sufficiently impressed on the Americans the importance of this kind of thing to how the US is perceived, or that the current approach really reflects what President Obama wants. Sometimes in this country it takes a little while for a new political will to change the Pavlovian learned responses of the official machine – I very much hope that’s the explanation for what’s happened here.