Wha' Democracy? You See Any Democracy?

Kudos to British High Court Judges John Thomas and David Lloyd Jones for raking the U.S. government over the coals Feb. 4. The judges said they could not release a U.S. document about the treatment of Binyam Mohamed at Guantanamo, because if it was released, the U.S. would revoke an intelligence-sharing agreement, perhaps the bulk of the 1947 UKUSA Treaty. The judges went a little far, though in wondering why "a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the evidence.." Umm, what democracy? Poor Barack Obama is trying to return the U.S. to a semblance of rudimentary proto-democracy, but we've been an authoritarian dictatorship for at least a decade - maybe since the end of World War II. If we're going to live up to the slamming the British court gave us, we've got a long way to go.