DOJ Has Blocked Everyone In The Executive Branch From Reading The Senate's Torture Report
from the this-is-ridiculous dept
A year ago, we were writing a ton on the famed Senate Intelligence Committee's torture report. This report, which Committee staffers spent years on, cost $40 million, and clocked in at nearly 7,000 pages of detailed analysis of the US's hugely questionable (both morally and legally) torture program in the wake of 9/11. After much fighting, the Senate finally released a heavily redacted executive summary, but since then there have been some questions about what happens with the full report. Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was (believe it or not!) the driving force behind the report, had copies of the full report delivered to the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department and the Justice Department. However, there has been a lot of confusion over whether or not anyone actually read it. The DOJ clearly announced that officials had read the whole thing... but later claimed that no one had even opened the report. Obviously, the DOJ lied with one of those statements.There had been some hope that ex-Senator Mark Udall might choose to release some of it from the Senate floor before leaving office, but that didn't happen.
And, with the changing of the guard, the new head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Burr, demanded that all the federal government agencies that received the report should return it to him so he can destroy it and make sure that no one ever sees what's in the report. As we noted, however, this whole thing seemed to be an effort to state publicly that the document was a Congressional record. That matters because Congressional records are not subject to FOIA requests. Executive branch records are subject to FOIA requests -- and the ACLU has made a FOIA request to the exec branch for a copy of the report.
The DOJ has taken Burr's lead and claimed that the report is a Congressional record, and that's also why they insist that no one at the DOJ has opened it -- to maintain that it has not become an executive branch record subject to FOIA. Not surprisingly, Senator Feinstein is pissed off about this -- because her staffers spent years putting together this report, detailing massive abuses by the CIA and others in torturing people, and the whole point of it was to help the government learn how badly it messed up and to stop it from doing it again. But if no one reads it, then that won't happen. And, the DOJ now says that not only has it not read it, it has instructed everyone in the exec branch not to read it for fear that reading it would make it subject to FOIA:
Nearly a year after the Senate released a declassified 500-page summary of the report, the fate of the entire document remains in limbo, the subject of battles in the courts and in Congress. Until those disputes are resolved, the Justice Department has prohibited officials from the government agencies that possess it from even opening the report, effectively keeping the people in charge of America’s counterterrorism future from reading about its past. There is also the possibility that the documents could remain locked in a Senate vault for good.Senator Feinstein (along with Senator Pat Leahy) has sent a rather angry letter (reasonably so!) to Attorney General Loretta Lynch, expressing her strong displeasure over this state of affairs:
Dear Attorney General Lynch and Director Comey:The DOJ's argument that it has to block anyone from reading the document, lest it magically switch from a Congressional document to an executive branch one is apparently puzzling to experts.
We firmly believe that appropriate DOJ and FBI officials must read the full 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program in order to understand what happened and draw appropriate lessons. This is exactly what Director Comey promised during his testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee on March 12, 2015, when he said he would designate FBI officials to read the full, final version of the Committee's Study and consider the lessons that can be learned from it. Director Comey also acknowledged that former FBI Director Bob Mueller ordered FBI agents not to participate in the CIA program. Unfortunately, as the executive summary of the Study makes clear, the Department of Justice was among those parts of the Executive Branch that were misled about the program, and DOJ officials' understanding of this history is critical to its institutional role going forward.
We are gravely disappointed that, according to Assistant Attorney General Peter Kadzik's letter dated August 5, 2015, the Department of Justice is citing a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case, ACLU v. CIA as an excuse to refuse to allow Executive Branch officials to review the full and final Study. This DOJ decision prevents the FBI and other parts of the Executive Branch from reading the full 6,700-page Study and learning from the mistakes of the past to ensure that they are not repeated. Further, personnel at the National Archives and Records Administration have stated that, based on guidance from the Department of Justice, they will not respond to questions about whether the Study constitutes a federal record under the Federal Records Act because the FOIA case is pending.
The record in the FOIA case does not support DOJ's decision. According to the court filings in the FOIA case, DOJ represented that it would "preserve the status quo" pending appeal, but the context in which that commitment arose makes clear that DOJ was agreeing not to return the Study to the Senate Intelligence Committee. DOJ's commitment not to return the Study while the FOIA litigation is pending in no way precludes appropriately cleared individuals in the Executive Branch from reading the Study. We urge that you reconsider your position and disseminate the full and final Committee Study to appropriately cleared senior individuals in the Department of Justice and FBI, and instruct other appropriate federal departments to take the same position. For the same reason, we urge you to explicitly commit to retaining copies of the full 6,700-page Study.
We hope you agree that the legacy of this historic report cannot be buried in the back of a handful of Executive Branch safes, never to be reviewed by those who most need to learn from it. We look forward to hearing from you on this important issue.
“It’s quite bizarre, and I cannot think of a precedent,” said Steven Aftergood, the director of the Project on Government Secrecy at the Federation of American Scientists. He said there are any number of classified Senate documents that are shared with intelligence agencies and remain as Congressional records, even if they are read by members of the executive branch.But it's not at all bizarre when put into the simple context of recognizing that this administration has bent over backwards refusing to look back on the nature of what the CIA did and whether or not it violated the law or international agreements on torture (or basic morality). This is just another way to avoid facing up to the mistakes of the past, and conveniently using a FOIA lawsuit as a method for making sure this information remains in the dark.
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Filed Under: dianne feinstein, doj, foia, loretta lynch, richard burr, senate intelligence committee, torture report
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These days, Dr Mengele would be living in the U.S.A.
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Re: These days, Dr Mengele would be living in the U.S.A.
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It's a noteworthy counterpoint to the just world hypothesis.
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Re: These days, Dr Mengele would be living in the U.S.A.
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Re: These days, Dr Mengele would be living in the U.S.A.
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torture is legal ?!?!
So the US citizens are free as in: "you- are- free BUT WE WILL TORTURE YOU" kind of freedom.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20151025/09565232619/court-your-fourth-fifth-amendment-rig hts-no-longer-exist-if-you-leave-country.shtml
ah oh! ok then
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This report needs to be Snowden'd
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Re: This report needs to be Snowden'd
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verbalized brand names
>>Dyson.
You mean to say that you've never Xeroxed a paper with a Canon or a Sharp?
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Re: verbalized brand names
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Re: This report needs to be Snowden'd
Yes, I just turned the man's name into a verb.
-- And with the shrewd use of the apostrophe d
-- thou hast done so with Shakespearean glee.
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(secret) presidential pardon
It would indeed seem like some kind of secret backroom deal was made, kind of like a pardon in everything but name. President Ford took much political heat for his official pardon of Richard Nixon. Obama is playing the game much smarter, by granting no pardons, but vigorously opposing any investigations and stymieing any process of justice, all the while giving lame excuses as to why this Most Transparent Administration in History® engages in such stubborn stonewalling -- if not outright coverups -- while waging scorched-earth warfare against leakers who expose Obama's sleight-of-hand.
It's a presidential pardon in everything but name. But unlike the Nixon pardon, which did not extend to Nixon's criminal conspirators (many of whom went to jail), Obama's *secret* pardon of the previous administration, with its long trail of blatant criminality, apparently extends from top to bottom.
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Re: (secret) presidential pardon
If he allowed the matter to be investigated by non-involved parties it could cause some awkward moments for some very powerful people, up to and including a former US president, and at that point he'd be forced to either defend not just generalities 'The USG ordered torture', but specifics 'The USG tortured these people, and this is how', or condemn the actions, and those that carried them out, something that would likely lead to some hefty political backlash from those affected trying to return the favor.
By instead stonewalling everything, and doing everything to keep things buried, he gets to pretend that nothing happened, and it's not his problem to deal with. Let the next sod clean up the mess(or more likely ignore it as well), he's not touching it.
It's a tactic that revolting, reprehensible and vile, but as far as covering his own ass, quite effective.
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That admission aside, we have the weirdness of the president himself (who just might happen to be part of the executive branch) not having read a single word of a $40m report that may or may not provide evidence of war crimes. That's a claim of slack that would make Bob Dobbs jealous.
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There's no enough money in the US Treasury to pay any of the government agencies to investigate something that big, and that bad, and even if they tried you can be sure that every other agency would close up ranks and stonewall until the sun went super-nova.
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Now? The NZ and Australian governments are xenophobic paranoiacs, Canada's burns books and censors scientists, and the UK's is literally implementing thought-crime laws. Germany 'hates' the NSA but hosts their biggest electronic ear, France is defending European freedom by jailing people who say rude things, and Spain made it illegal to criticize the police or hold protests without getting permission from the people you're protesting against.
Snowden unintentionally gave the West's governments permission to transition from giving a fraction of a fuck to giving Zero Fucks (TM).
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Re: (secret) presidential pardon
The day before the torture report was released, Anthony D. Romero - executive director of the ACLU - published an important op-ed in the NY Times where called for Obama to pardon Bush and the other torturers. This seems like an unusual goal for the head of the ACLU to make, but I suspect he was thinking about this exact problem of a "stealth pardon". He says as much in the op-ed:
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Remember what they tell us!
*Proud reference to a different comment sub-thread.
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this administration is so transparent
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It's like we're back in grade school
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Leak it
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- Kevin Underhill on Twitter
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Way to minimize! Go Hitlerry 2016!
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Unnecessary godwin
Any person in the Oval Office will be a tyrant. I don't think it's feasible for someone to not be.
Contrast what Obama said while campaigning and what he's done in the White House.
Expect that degree of transformation in our next President.
Heh. N. E. CANDIDATE Not what you'd expect!
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It was standard practice for the previous administration. Eighty-eight White House staffers - Bush II, Karl Rove and the rest - instead used a private email server belonging to the Republican National Committee. Much of that email went missing.
Jeb Bush, while governor, also used a private email address on his own private server. (This can help protect emails from subpoenas and other legal actions.) Perhaps the only reason you don't hear about the other leading Republican candidates doing the same while in office is that they've never been in office.
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Previous administration was terrible so was Bill Clinton. Jeb would just be deja vu as would Hillary.
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Again, the real question is why this was standard practice for BOTH parties. It's unlikely that the current Republican front-runners wouldn't have done the same.
Yes, it's wrong. But it's yet another of the endless cases of Republicans having sanctimonious hissy fits over Democrats following established Republican policy.
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We can't keep putting more of the same kinds of people in office and expect different results. That's insanity defined.
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You say that as if Feistein isn't in on it. As most of us have realized, she's simply trying to make it "look good".
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Feinstein's Torture Report might be a similarly impotent soft-glove approach to investigation -- which we may never know since it's (still) secret.
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Honestly, the US Government put a damn High-Pressure Rectal Hummus Cannon into active service, and almost no one even remembers or cares.
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DON'T DO THIS THING IT WILL EXPOSE US TO ACCOUNTABILITY!
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My fear is not merely that we may repeat those mistakes
There are still certain camps within Camp Delta to which you really don't want to be assigned.
They're all special for the US's non-compliant guests.
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Must Use Black Ink
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From the "I Could Tell You, But Then I'd Have to Kill You" file
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Power Concedes Nothing Without A Demand*
The indelible stain of torture didn't simply splash the CIA by chance. The entire sordid tale begins in the highest echelons of the Bush (war criminal) administration when attorney John Yoo (war criminal) of the DOJ's (HAHA) Office of Legal Counsel authored (signed off by Jay Bybee (war criminal) a memorandum titled: Standards of Conduct for Interrogation (aka "torture memo") to Alberto Gonzales (war criminal), in his capacity as Counsel to the President. This memorandum became the specious impetus for the US governments use of most recent use of torture.
There is plenty of evidence available in the public domain that could be used to hold these fraction of a human war criminals accountable. The only thing that is lacking is the will to make it happen.
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/torturingdemocracy/documents/20020801-1.pdf
* “Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and never will. Show me the exact amount of wrong and injustices that are visited upon a person and I will show you the exact amount of words endured by these people.” ~ Frederick Douglass
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Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss
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Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss
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They are going for plausible deniability.
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Now she knows how it feels when a politician tells her he'll do one thing and then does the opposite.
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