???"If you tell my secret, then I won't tell you any more!"
???Kindergarten recess or state department? You get three guesses and the first two don't count.
???To be fair, intelligence secrets aren't supposed to be shared, or they cease to be intelligence and become gossip. This is understood. But when those secrets are in fact damning allegations of United States-sanctioned torture then it seems like they could stand to be shared.
???A British court was allegedly threatened in a letter by the United States as a deterrent to making public details of the imprisonment of Binyam Mohamed, a legal resident of Britain who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and accused of working with Jose Padilla to build and detonate a dirty bomb in the U.S.
???The charges against Mohamed have since been dropped, but he remains at Guantanamo Bay in a strange limbo created by the leadership change in America. The communiqu?(c) with the British government was delivered several months ago, making it a late product of the Bush era, whereas the decision of what to do with Mohamed rests on the shoulders of President Barack Obama.
???The threat delivered by the Bush administration was more of an ultimatum, really: We won't share our secrets with you if you can't keep them. But if the secrets in question are being kept under wraps purely to save the American reputation, is it just of us to lump them in with real intelligence?
???The answer is no. It will be more damaging to deny what was done in the last eight years than it would be to simply acknowledge our actions and appear contrite. Now we must admit our mistakes and show that we are committed to learning from them. And these are our mistakes; even if we were not implicitly aware of what was going on, we allowed a situation that made these events possible to be created.
???Truly, we have been shamed in the eyes of the world. For eight years, we allowed ourselves to be ruled by fear, and we sacrificed a great part of ourselves. It is not guaranteed that we will be able to recover fully from this, but with proper action we may be able to limit the scar.
???Oh, and if the charges against him have been dropped, let the poor man out of Gitmo, at least.
Photo: Courtesy of Laron Fomby
