Is Obama a token Commander-in-Chief?

You have to wonder what is going on when the Pentagon won't let President Obama know we cut a prisoner's penis among other torture.

Two days ago, Clive Stafford Smith, one of Mohamed’s lawyers, wrote a letter to President Obama in an appeal to make the documents public and to inform him of his client’s case. However, the letter was sent back, with the entire section detailing Mohamed’s torture redacted, as Smith told the UK’s Channel 4 News:

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: The world has gone totally mad. We are trying to get the information to the President of the United States so he can assess whether this torture material should be made public. The censors in Washington, the military censors, won’t let their own commander in chief see it. It’s bizarre.

The Guardian notes a possible motive behind the move. “It is understood US defence officials might have censored the evidence to protect the president from criminal liability or political embarrassment.”

Indeed, the documents reportedly contain “details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, ‘is very far down the list of things they did,’” one British intelligence official said.