U.S. and UK governments hide behind national security excuse to cover up war crimes

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Colonel Ian Henderson was a British official dubbed "the Butcher of Bahrain" because of atrocities he repeatedly committed during the 30 years he served as chief security official of that Middle Eastern country. His reign of terror began in 1966 when Bahrain was a British "protectorate" and continued when the post-"independence" Bahraini King retained him in the same position. In 1996, described him as "the most feared of all secret policemen" in Bahrain, and cited "consistent and compelling evidence that severe beatings and even sexual assaults have been carried out against prisoners under Henderson's responsibility for well over a decade."

A 2002 article reported that "during this time his men allegedly detained and tortured thousands of anti-government activists"; his official acts "included the ransacking of villages, sadistic sexual abuse and using power drills to maim prisoners"; and "on many occasions they are said to have detained children without informing their parents, only to return them months later in body bags." Needless to say, Col. Henderson was never punished in any way: "although Scotland Yard launched an inquiry into the allegations in 2000, the investigation was dropped the following year." He was showered with high honors from the U.K.-supported tyrants who ran Bahrain.

Prior to the massacres and rapes over which he presided in Bahrain, Henderson played a leading role in brutally suppressing the Mau Mau insurgency in another British colony, Kenya. In the wake of his Kenya atrocities, he twice won the George Medal, "the 2nd highest, to the George Cross, gallantry medal that a civilian can win." His brutality against Kenyan insurgents fighting for independence is what led the U.K. government to put him in charge of internal security in Bahrain.

For years, human rights groups have fought to obtain old documents, particularly a 37-year-old diplomatic cable, relating to British responsibility for Henderson's brutality in Bahrain. Ordinarily, documents more than 30 years old are disclosable, but the British government has fought every step of the way to conceal this cable.

But now, a governmental tribunal ruled largely in favor of the government and held that most of the diplomatic cable shall remain suppressed. The tribunal's ruling was at least partially based on "secret evidence for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) from a senior diplomat, Edward Oakden, who argued that Britain's defence interests in Bahrain were of paramount importance"; specifically, "Mr Oakden implied that the release of such information could jeopardise Britain's new military base in the country."

The U.K. government loves to demonize others for supporting tyrants even as it snuggles up to virtually every despot in that region. Her Majesty's Government has a particularly close relationship with Bahrain, where it is constructing a new naval base. The Kingdom is already home to the United States' Fifth Fleet.

The tribunal's rationale is that "full disclosure of the document would have 'an adverse effect on relations' with Bahrain, where the U.K. is keen to build further economic and defence ties." In other words, disclosing these facts would make the British and/or the Bahrainis look bad, cause them embarrassment, and could make their close friendship more difficult to sustain. Therefore, the British and Bahraini populations must be denied access to the evidence of what their governments did.

This is the core mindset now prevalent in both the U.S. and U.K. for hiding their crimes from their own populations and then rest of the world: disclosure of what we did will embarrass and shame us, cause anger toward us, and thus harm our "national security." As these governments endlessly highlight the bad acts of those who are adverse to them, they vigorously hide their own, thus propagandizing their publics into believing that only They — the Other Tribe Over There — commit such acts.

This is exactly the same mentality driving the Obama administration's years-long effort to suppress photographs showing torture of detainees by the U.S. In 2009, Obama said he would comply with a court ruling that ordered those torture photos disclosed, but weeks after his announcement, reversed himself. Adopting the argument made by a group run by Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney against disclosure of the photos, Obama insisted that to release the photos "would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in danger." Obama went further and announced his support for a bill sponsored by Lindsey Graham and Joe Lieberman to amend the Freedom of Information Act — a legislative accomplishment which Rep. Louise Slaughter told me at the time had long been "sacred" to Democrats — for no reason other than to exempt those torture photos from disclosure.

In March of this year, a U.S. judge who had long sided with the Obama DOJ in this matter reversed course. In a lawsuit brought by the ACLU, the judge ordered the release of thousands of photos showing detainee abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq, including at Abu Ghraib. He ruled that the Obama DOJ could no longer show any national security harm that would justify ongoing suppression.

Rather than accepting the ruling and releasing the photos after hiding them for more than a decade, the U.S. Justice Department last week filed an emergency request for a stay of that ruling with the appeals court. The argument from The Most Transparent Administration Ever™:

    

No healthy democracy can possibly function where this warped mindset prevails: we are entitled to hide anything we do that makes us look bad because making us look bad harms "national security," and we are the ones who make that decision without challenge. As the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer said:

To allow the government to suppress any image that might provoke someone, somewhere, to violence would be to give the government sweeping power to suppress evidence of its own agents' misconduct. Giving the government that kind of censorial power would have implications far beyond this specific context.

But even more threatening than the menace to democracy is the propagandized public this mentality guarantees. A government that is able to hide its own atrocities on "national security" grounds will be one whose public endlessly focuses on the crimes of others while remaining blissfully unaware of one's own nation. That is an excellent description of much of the American and British public, and as good an explanation as any why much of their public discourse consists of little more than proclamations that despite the decades of brutality, aggression and militarism their own side has perpetrated.