Seven Paragraphs of Torture

Here's hoping UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband got a good night's sleep last night. Because a court ruling out of London today isn't going to put him in a good mood, nor will it please U.S. officials who were hoping to keep confidential seven paragraphs of text that show a former Guantanamo inmate, Binyam Mohamed, was tortured with little to no efficacy during his nearly seven years in U.S. custody.

Three of Britain's senior judges ruled that the British government has to turn over evidence that Binyam Mohamed was tortured at GTMO. Specifically, the seven paragraphs of text in question will reveal that MI5 -- the very "Alias" sounding counter-intelligence unit of the British military -- was complicit with the cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment that Mohamed received while in U.S. custody, both at GTMO and at detention centers that Mohamed was held at before being transferred to GTMO.

According to human rights groups, including the UK's Liberty, the court's order to release these paragraphs will certainly show Britain's involvement in some of the darkest practices of the War on Terror.

"These embarrassing paragraphs reveal nothing of use to terrorists but they do show something of the UK government's complicity with the most shameful part of the war on terror," said Liberty's Shami Chakrabarti, according to the Guardian. "The government has gone to extraordinary lengths to cover up kidnap and torture. A full public inquiry is now inescapable."

Somewhere Dick Cheney and the architects of the War on Terror are throwing their television remote controls against the wall.

And this isn't your milquetoast level of harsh interrogation techniques, either. Sure, there was sleep deprivation. But Mohamed also had a razor blade taken to his genitals, was kept in total darkness for upwards of six months, was forced to listen to loud music (including Eminem and Dr. Dre) for 20 days straight, and was hung up and suspended in the air for days at a time, causing his legs to swell.

After all of that, how much useful intelligence did the U.S. get from Binyam Mohamed?

Not a lick.

So if you need more evidence that cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of detainees produces absolutely nothing, here come seven paragraphs that will likely make you squirm, squint and shudder. But rest assured that nothing revealed in these seven paragraphs will have made you any safer from the threat of terrorism.

Photo credit: jeshua.nace