The information about the "supposed threat" can also be found in this Feb. BBC article: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/7870896.stm, which Glenn linked to in his article on Feb. 19.

As Glenn said then:

And this was a threat that the Obama administration clearly affirmed and even continued, as it actually thanked Britain for continuing to conceal this information and affirmed that Britain, as a result of its complicity in the concealment, could continue to receive intelligence from the U.S.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/02/19/exceptionalism/

The letter referenced in today's post by Glenn, was apparently submitted on May 6 then again on May 11 with one change (underlined in the May 11 version). If the threat didn't exist before, it certainly does now. These might help sort out the timeline:

Guardian 5/1

Lawyers acting for David Miliband, the foreign secretary, today made a last-ditch attempt in the high court to block the release of information showing what British authorities knew about the mistreatment of Binyam Mohamed, the UK resident who says he was tortured before being secretly taken to Guantánamo Bay....

However, David Mackie, a senior government lawyer, told the two judges that Miliband had been told by Obama administration officials that the disclosure of the seven paragraphs "could likely result in serious damage to UK and US national security". The claim was made despite Obama's recent decision to release detailed information about CIA interrogation techniques, including waterboarding.

Mackie's letter is a response to a decision by the judges to reject an earlier request from Miliband's lawyers to delay their ruling. The judges were expected at a hearing next week to rule that the CIA summary could be disclosed.

This latest move in the long-running case in the high court comes as a federal appeals court in the US has ruled that a case brought there by five men including Mohamed and another UK resident, Bisher al-Rawi, who say they were tortured under the CIA's extraordinary rendition programme, can go ahead.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/01/binyam-mohamed-miliband-cia-guantanamo

AP 5/7

An attorney for the British government — Treasury lawyer David Mackie — sent the justices a letter Wednesday [5/6/09] from an official in the Obama administration who said the disclosure of the information could still harm both U.S. and U.K. national security.

The U.S. official, who was not named, said while the Obama administration has moved to release the legal memos that allowed harsher interrogation techniques, no mention has yet been made of countries that helped the United States.

"The United States continues to preserve the secrecy of such information as critical to our national security," the letter read.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5junnlo64ITDwX7j8laiUSbOIYtIgD980V0F82

The Army photographer, Ronald Haeberle, assigned to Charlie Company on March 16th, 1968 had two cameras. One was an Army standard; one was his personal camera. The film on the Army owned camera, i.e., the official camera of the State, showed standard operations that is “authorized” and “official” operations including interrogating villagers and burning “insurgent” huts.

What the film on the personal camera showed, however, was different. When turned over to the press and Government by the photographer, those “unofficial” photographs provided the grounds for a court martial. Haeberle’s personal images (owned by himself and not the US Government) showed hundreds of villagers who had been killed by U.S. troops. More significantly, they showed that the dead were primarily women and children, including infants. These photographs exposed the fact that the “insurgents” in popular discourse about Vietnam were actually unarmed civilians. The photos made visible to viewers that the “enemy” in Vietnam was actually the indigenous Vietnamese population. (Camilla Benolirao Griggers, “War and the Politics of Perception,” chapter 1 from the essay Visualizing War.)

http://www.learnnc.org/lp/multimedia/3290

Life magazine, calling My Lai "a story of indisputable horror," published ten pages of gut-wrenching photographs of the massacre in process.

Although it had taken over a year and a half, the massacre of My Lai, in all its graphic detail, had become a household topic of conversation. Never before had ordinary Americans directly confronted the brutality of their own soldiers. For some, My Lai con-firmed their worst fears about America's war in Vietnam. For others, My Lai contradicted not just their vision of the war in Vietnam, but also a longstanding American tradition of depicting the enemy, whether Indians, Nazis, Japanese, or Vietnamese, as the perpetrators of heinous atrocities—not typical American "boys."

http://www.accessmylibrary.com/coms2/summary_0193-11081_ITM

It's also the reason the photos need to be released now. There are a few new generations who need to see the truth about what their government is capable of.

First, they're photos, not video. Second, they show abuses at locations "other than Abu Ghraib," according to the ACLU's Amrit Singh, who wrote in March:

The public value of these images is considerable. As visual records, they convey what words could not possibly communicate. As evidence of abuse at locations other than Abu Ghraib, they undermine the Bush administration’s claim that abuse was aberrational. The disclosure of these images is critical to help the public understand the scope and scale of prisoner abuse as well as the extent to which such abuse was caused by policy decisions. Disclosure is also crucial for assessing official responsibility for the abuse.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/amrit-singh/release-photos-of-other-a_b_173046.html

The Editor & Publisher article references photos and video that show abuses at Abu Ghraib and which Sy Hersh spoke of at the ACLU event in 2004 (http://boingboing.net/2004/07/15/hersh-children-raped.html). the incidents of rape and murder are in the Abu Ghraib photos/video. I don't think we know exactly what's in the photos Obama has refused to release.