In a shocking revelation just posted at UK Guardian, Binyam Mohamed’s attorney Clive Stafford Smith, who is also director of the legal charity Reprieve, reports that “substantial parts” of a memo, attached to a letter to Barack Obama, documenting evidence of Mohamed’s torture at the hands of CIA agents and their extraordinary rendition proxies, were blanked out so the president could not read them. Who did that?

US defence officials are preventing Barack Obama from seeing evidence that a former British resident held in Guantánamo Bay has been tortured, the prisoner’s lawyer said last night, as campaigners and the Foreign Office prepared for the man’s release in as little as a week….

Stafford Smith tells Obama he should be aware of the “bizarre reality” of the situation. “You, as commander in chief, are being denied access to material that would help prove that crimes have been committed by US personnel. This decision is being made by the very people who you command.”

Smith’s letter to Obama can be read here (PDF).

(I see our own buhdydharma has also covered important and somewhat overlapping aspects as this diary, with a great video, too, in his aptly titled essay, “Wow!”)

Controversy continues to mount over the suppression of key evidence of U.S. torture in the case of Ethiopian national, Binyam Mohamed, at the suspected behest of the Obama administration. UK High Court judges in the case wanted to release the evidence, but Foreign Secretary David Miliband prevented this, saying it would harm UK intelligence cooperation with the United States. The U.S. reputedly threatened a break in cooperation with British intelligence services if the torture evidence, which is part of a CIA file, was released. (Update: The Age has now published documentary evidence of the U.S. threat — see below. H/T to Patriot Daily News Clearinghouse.)

Whatever threats were made, after the suppression of the evidence, and in the face of the protest by the UK judges, the Obama administration told BBC News it was grateful for the cooperation, i.e., the cover-up.

This diary explores the serious problems with the justifications for a limited, legal, and supposedly humane system of renditions to be run by the CIA (or other governmental agency). Such justifications would thus inform the review ordered by President Obama on interrogations and rendition in general.

In contradistinction to the views of Scott Horton, Glenn Greenwald, Andrew Sullivan, and TalkLeft’s Scribe, among others, I maintain that any program of extraordinary rendition, i.e., any extrajudicial abduction of a foreign citizen from foreign soil, violates international law. Furthermore, the liberal bloggers mentioned above have either ignored or downplayed or misrepresented that fact.

The issue seems to bring out a lot of passion, as it should. For one thing, it raises some criticisms of Obama and the left at a time when we are fighting the right-wing on the economy, torture, military policy, etc. But the torture/renditions issue goes to the heart of civilized international relations, and must not get lost in the shuffle. Please read on and certainly feel free to voice your comments. Substantive and respectful comments, even criticisms, are always appreciated.

The Los Angeles Times had an article over the weekend by Greg Miller, describing the decision by the Obama administration to maintain, in some form, the secret rendition program of the CIA. The program began under the Clinton administration, and was accelerated President Bush. Full details of the program are classified.

In legal terms, extraordinary rendition is the “extrajudicial transfer of a person from one State to another.” But for most of us, rendition remains a fancy term for kidnapping, and involves snatching suspected “terrorists” off the streets, or from airports, as in the case of innocent Canadian citizen Maher Arar, snatched out of JFK airport, and secretly flown to Syria. Maher spent over ten months in a “grave-like” cell, and was beaten and tortured into making a false confession.

A huge step in the fight against torture took place today. Center for Constitutional Rights has joined Physicians for Human Rights, The Constitution Project — and myself — and come out publicly against the abusive interrogation techniques contained in the Army Field Manual.

This is significant because the Army Field Manual is being put forward by President Obama and top Democratic Senators as the proposed “single standard” for all interrogations by the military and the CIA. Meanwhile, old recalcitrant Bushites, and the CIA, are for their part trying to paint the current AFM as “too soft” for use with “terrorist” suspects.

Their “action alert”, reprinted below, includes an automated letter that you can send to President Obama asking him to say NO to interrogation practices that include isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and humiliation. It also asks for investigations of those officials ” for those officials who broke the law to create an official program of torture and abuse.”

Josh Gerstein at Politico has ably described the important shortcomings one finds in President Obama’s Executive Orders issued yesterday to close Guantanamo and end torture. While the CIA is disallowed from using waterboarding and other “enhanced” torture techniques, and forced to adhere to the standards (flawed as they are) of the Army Field Manual; and while the CIA is forced now to close their secret black site prisons; and while Guantanamo itself is to be close “promptly… within a year”, there are some troublesome problems remaining.

Not least is the problem with the Army Field Manual itself. Some former Bush administration figures and CIA types see the AFM as insufficient to guide their interrogation actions in the field. They want the ability to improvise their techniques to the given interrogation or situation.  Many of these same people are implying that Obama’s moves to close Guantanamo raises the spectre of the release of horrible terrorists in the homeland itself, who will attack American communities. In a column today, Glenn Greenwald dissects this fear-mongering campaign by the right.

An Associated Press story by Lara Jakes and Pamela Hess, released today, reports on President Obama’s intention to limit the CIA to interrogation techniques listed in the Army Field Manual. The pending Executive Orders on interrogation would also end the practice of detention by the CIA in secret prisons. But, in a potential sop to the Agency:

[Obama’s] advisers are considering adding a classified loophole to the rules that could allow the CIA to use some interrogation methods not specifically authorized by the Pentagon…

Such a “loophole” would be included as a classified annex to the Army Field Manual, which the article assures us doesn’t allow threats or coercion, while also banning physical abuse and outrageous torture techniques like waterboarding. The article does single out, without explanation, that there is a special AFM technique allowed “in some cases” — isolation.