As always, Andy McCarthy hits the ball out of the park with his post on the “disclosures” ordered by a British court about the CIA’s treatment of al-Qaeda terrorist Binyam Mohammed. This has been a non-story in the United States, but it is front-page news in the U.K. These classified paragraphs were supposed to show incontrovertible evidence that the CIA brutally tortured Binyam Mohammed. In fact, they show no such thing.

There seems to be a pattern here, where the Left hypes some top-secret document that will finally prove their case, once and for all, that the CIA committed egregious abuses. The anticipation builds, the press hypes the story, there are leaks about what the document supposedly says, but when the document finally comes out . . . it completely deflates their case. This was what happened with the CIA Inspector General’s report, which was supposed to prove a) a pattern of systemic CIA abuse and b) that the CIA program did not work. Instead, it proved the opposite. Now history repeats itself with these disclosures from the U.K. (Here are the graphs from the U.K. Foreign Office. Judge for yourselves.)

For the record, let’s review who Binyam Mohammed really is. He is painted in the British press as a poor victim, but as I detail in Courting Disaster, he is in fact a committed terrorist who was deployed on a plot to kill hundreds, possibly thousands, of innocent people here in the United States.

Binyam Mohammed was Jose Padilla’s partner in a KSM plot to blow up apartment buildings in a major American city using natural gas. He and Padilla met with KSM in Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks to discuss the plot and receive instructions from al-Qaeda’s operational commander. They were trained in how to seal an apartment to trap the natural gas and to prepare an explosion using that gas that would destroy the building. KSM specifically instructed them to ensure that the explosives went off at a point high enough to prevent the people trapped in the floors above from escaping out the windows. KSM’s right-hand man, Ammar al-Baluchi, gave them cash and travel documents. And the night before their departure from Pakistan to carry out the mission, KSM, Ammar, and Ramzi Bin al-Shibh hosted a farewell dinner for the two terrorists — a send-off to America from the men responsible for the destruction of Sept. 11, 2001.

Both men were subsequently captured. But instead of prosecuting Binyam Mohammed — either by military commission or in federal court — the Obama administration released him to the U.K., where he has become a cause célèbre of the Left.

Given what he planned to do, and the intelligence he possessed, the techniques detailed in these paragraphs are quite mild. Remember that these techniques were employed by the CIA in an escalating fashion, beginning with the least coercive first and culminating in waterboarding. Based on what the U.K. released, Mohammed clearly didn’t get very far. He basically gave in with very limited EITs — as most detainees did.

This is a man who should be in a prison cell in Guantanamo today. Thanks to the Obama administration, he’s a British celebrity.