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.

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.

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.

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...

Filed Under: black ink, cia, dianne feinstein, redactions, senate intelligence committee, torture, torture report, white house