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Read other letters about this article
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
