White House Finishes Review Of CIA Terror Report: Feinstein Wants To Know Why It's Basically All Blacked Out
from the let's-try-this-again dept
We've been joking the last few weeks about how everyone was waiting for the White House to dump buckets of black ink on the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report. As we'd noted, for reasons that still don't make any sense, the CIA was given first crack at redacting the 480 page declassified executive summary of the 6,300 page, $40 million Senate Intelligence report into the CIA's torture program. Once the CIA was done with it, it was handed over to the White House to exhaust reserve stores of black ink.And that appears to be exactly what happened. Late Friday, Senator Dianne Feinstein announced that the White House had returned the executive summary, but she's a bit overwhelmed by all the black ink and is holding off releasing the document until her staff can look into why there were so many redactions:
The committee this afternoon received the redacted executive summary of our study on the CIA detention and interrogation program.At least Feinstein didn't just rubber stamp the redactions. The Senate Intelligence Committee has been pushing to release this report for over a year now, and it's been clear that the CIA/White House was going to fight them on it somewhat.
A preliminary review of the report indicates there have been significant redactions. We need additional time to understand the basis for these redactions and determine their justification.
Therefore the report will be held until further notice and released when that process is completed.
Given the most recent revelations about the CIA's attempt to spy on the Senate and to lie and mislead the Senate and the public about all of this, it seems like we shouldn't take their word for any of this. One hopes that the Senate pushes back strongly on bogus redactions. Or, better yet, that the Senate Intelligence Committee just overrides the White House and releases it themselves. Or, you know, that someone decides to just leak the damn thing already...
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Filed Under: black ink, cia, dianne feinstein, redactions, senate intelligence committee, torture, torture report, white house
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Because it works
Spending on politics yields protection from new business-killing laws, new laws that hurt competitors, and special tax and regulation advantages.
Once your competitors start doing it, you have to do it too to keep up, or be killed by new legislation inspired by your competitors.
The problem is NOT that politicians are venal. They have always been greedy, and always will be.
The problem is that Congress has the power to pick winners and losers, to pass arbitrary regulations without any justification, and to give tax breaks to anyone they feel like for any reason at all.
Congress has too much power, and power corrupts.
The only solution is to limit the kind of laws Congress can pass, and to provide a mechanism for constitutional review of laws that are unfair, biased, or play favorites.
The courts have traditionally deferred to the legislature, saying that if a majority of the legislature things a law is in the public interest, then it must be so.
That needs to change.
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Re: Because it works
Uh, that's the Constitution. The First Amendment even starts with "Congress Shall Make no Law".
But as long as nobody steps up and stands in for his Constitution, obviously Congress can make any law it wants to.
Benjamin Franklin called the just established political system of the U.S.A. "A Republic, if you can keep it."
But these days, keeping it is Somebody Else's Problem.
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Re: Re: Because it works
But a large part of the reason the Constitution is no longer respected is because the courts have been AWOL.
Their job, under the Constitution, is to say "no" to the other branches of government when they attempt to exceed their constitutional powers.
And that is exactly what the courts have refused to do.
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Re: Because it works
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Re: reply 2 redacted report
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The idea that anyone would be surprised that every last shred of potentially incriminating information would be gutted, after both the CIA, who the report is about, and the WH, who likely shares a good portion of the guilt/blame for ordering and okaying what was done, got through with it, is just beyond comprehension.
Really, someone that clueless would have Darwin'd themselves long before they could make it into politics, or even adulthood.
Here's hoping the Senate responds by releasing the unredacted copy of the document, if not because that needs to happen, then to show the other parts of the government what happens when they go overboard with the black marker trying to hide their crimes.
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Anyways, ideally at this point they would release the redacted version, then a few days later opt to release the unredacted version using public criticism of the redactions as justification. That way not only would we get the full report, but we'd see specifically what the White House and the CIA had hoped to hide.
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After the CIA and the White House redacted it...
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Re: After the CIA and the White House redacted it...
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Actually I consider her one of the most shit-leaking representatives in congress.
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Someone just needs to anonymously release it.
This sort of behavior out of an intelligence agency and a Whitehouse is the same sort of behavior we would have expected out of 1939 Germany.
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Re: Someone just needs to anonymously release it.
Fascists gotta fasc dude.
If you don't have government being the handmaiden to business how can the MICC make coin?
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http://goo.gl/WW3OjR
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Resultantly the text bunches up together so much that it just appears all black. That's really a hundred pages worth of print in font size 12 compressed into one page that only looks black because the resultant font size is way way too small to be seen.
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Not Yet...
Not yet. There is still time. Have a little faith.
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http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Censorship
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See, it went like this...
Then it went to the White House and was reviewed by State, which blacked out everything embarrassing to State. They didn't care about the other parts, "Let them worry about it."
Then it was reviewed by DOJ, which blacked out everything embarrassing to DOJ. Etc.
Then it was reviewed by DHS. Ditto.
Then it was reviewed by the president's staff, which blacked out everything embarrassing to presidents (current and former). After they were done, nothing was left.
After all, that's what happens when all the authors of a debacle get to censor the report of the debacle.
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What is redacted and why
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It is my belief that Feinstein is merely trying to rehabitate her image, and that this will end up like the elephant in the mouse cage -- where everyone is getting squished to death, but no one admits anything out of the ordinary is happening.
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Remember that the legislative staffers were threatened with criminal prosecution. The CIA brought in the DOJ investigators earlier this year.
That might have more of an effect than most people give credit to.
I was once threatened with prosecution because I didn't go along with another department's plan: the commercialization office wanted to license something that had been planned and funded as freely available. They referred the issue to the agency IG's office, claiming it was an export violation.
There were lots of political tussles that I've long since forgiven (and mostly forgotten), but not that one.
However far-fetched the theory, an explicit threat of being sent to prison for doing your job well isn't taken well. The senate staffers, who do most of the internal work and thus make most of the decisions, are going to be taking the Torture Report black-outs personally. Especially since it appears that nothing is going to be done about the CIA people that monitored and spied on them, and then denied that they did so.
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which each threat the CIA DOJ makes against dissent builds (hopefully)
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Quite a bit, actually. I think people underestimate just how much any sort of high-level leader relies on their staff for decision making. A member of congress naturally has a ton of issues on their plate and they rely on their staff to give them advice on the best course of action. Most of the time, unless the advice is way off, the congressperson is going to follow it.
Likewise, top-level leaders tend to be very protective of their staff. Feinstein was most likely legitimately angry when the CIA hacked her staffer's computers. Now those same staffers have a strong reason to dislike the people doing the redaction, and you put them in the same room with someone who's already angry on their behalf...
These guys probably won't even have to try very hard to convince her it's in the nation's (and her career's) best interest to blow this thing as open as she can. And when it comes to rejecting the redactions, she's not going to be reading it and analyzing it herself...her staff is going to be going through it line-by-line and playing each change off the letter of the law for classified information.
Trust me, anyone who's worked on a government staff learns how to "lawyer" really fast, and they get extremely good at playing the rules. While it's certainly possible that their influence may be low, in all likelihood they've been waiting for this.
It'll be interesting to see how it works out.
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Least Untruthful Press release from the future...
In other news, the CIA and White House are refuting Senator Dianne Feinstein's allegation of excessive blacking out on the Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report. Explaining that, "No one else (in the White House or CIA) is having any problem reading the report (the unredacted one, of course). Old people frequently have poor eyesight and she should see her optometrist. If she still has a problem with blacking out, perhaps she should stop drinking alcohol altogether. We have released the report (but not before we blacked out practically the entire thing) to Senator Feinstein, and it is she who is refusing to release the (blacked out released) report."
"Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel."
Mark Twain
Updated:
"Never pick a fight with governments who buy toner by the ton."
DogBreath (2014)
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Taking the 5th
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reply to CIA report redactions
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reply to CIA report redactions
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Unlikely anything meaningful will be released
Its the too big to prosecute version of too big to fail.
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"...the report will be held until further notice..."
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Re: "...the report will be held until further notice..."
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Release the full unedited report...
Those assholes who tortured folks? I'm thinking old testament here - give them 10x the treatment they dished out and covered up, every stinking person that was involved with either the torture, covering it up and saying "it's okay".
Once we've cleared out the entire Executive branch with the entire CIA and NSA staff, we can start fresh with real people who actually understand the Constitution and Bill of Rights and will actually uphold their oaths to uphold and protect each.
9/11 did NOT change the constitution or bill of rights, period.
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