While the big guys like the A.C.L.U. and C.R.E.W. certainly deserve credit for finally prying the information out of the government, anyone obsessed with these things knows that the next Pulitzer should go to emptywheel, the person who has tirelessly kept up with the documentation, parsed it into digestable bytes, and given it to us in a form we can almost understand. Here comes some more… Mr. Obama’s decision in April to release legal opinions from the Bush administration on interrogation, which were sought in a lawsuit, has opened the door to the disclosure of other documents…
In new responses to lawsuits, the C.I.A. has agreed to release information from two previously secret sources: statements by high-level members of Al Qaeda who say they have been mistreated, and a 2004 report by the agency’s inspector general questioning both the legality and the effectiveness of coercive interrogations.
The Qaeda prisoners’ statements, made at tribunals at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were previously excised from transcripts of the proceedings, but they will be at least partly disclosed by this Friday, according to a court filing. The report by the inspector general, whose secret findings in April 2004 led to a suspension of the C.I.A. interrogation program, will be released by June 19, the Justice Department said in a letter to a federal judge in New York…
The releases expected this month will not begin to exhaust the anticipated disclosures on interrogation. The Justice Department’s long-awaited ethics report on the lawyers who wrote the interrogation memorandums is set for release this summer. A criminal investigation of the destruction of interrogation videotapes by John H. Durham, a federal prosecutor, is still under way.
The A.C.L.U., one of a dozen advocacy groups fighting in court for details of the Bush administration security programs, plans to file another lawsuit on Thursday, this one seeking additional White House and Justice Department documents on interrogation. The same day, the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, a coalition of clergy members, will meet with Obama administration officials to argue for a national commission, said a spokesman, Steve Fox.
The Democratic chairmen of the Senate and House judiciary committees, Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont and Representative John Conyers of Michigan, continue to press for such a commission, though their efforts so far show no sign of winning majority support. A spokesman for Mr. Leahy, David Carle, said the senator saw the commission proposal as “an uphill battle,” but he added, “He has kept the option alive.”
The detail that Abu Zubaydah was waterboarded 83 times in a month and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed got into the OLC memo via the CIA IG Report released May 2004. So, too, did the reports that CIA interrogators exceeded the guidelines laid out in the Bybee Two memo. And the conclusion that the torture couldn’t be said to have stopped any attacks? That was in the CIA IG Report, too.
Which is why the IG Report’s reported release – on June 19 – might be big news. Or, it might be 400 pages of mostly redacted content.
In new responses to lawsuits, the C.I.A. has agreed to release information from two previously secret sources: statements by high-level members of Al Qaeda who say they have been mistreated, and a 2004 report by the agency’s inspector general questioning both the legality and the effectiveness of coercive interrogations.The Qaeda prisoners’ statements, made at tribunals at the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, were previously excised from transcripts of the proceedings, but they will be at least partly disclosed by this Friday, according to a court filing. The report by the inspector general, whose secret findings in April 2004 led to a suspension of the C.I.A. interrogation program, will be released by June 19, the Justice Department said in a letter to a federal judge in New York.
Precisely how much the agency will disclose, however, remains to be determined, as the administration is clearly struggling to decide where to draw the line. In both cases, which involve separate Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, the documents are likely to be redacted to withhold information the C.I.A. still considers especially delicate.Me? I’ll be pleasantly surprised [though not satisfied] if they release pages 85 though 91, which talk about the [in]efficacy of the program. It was in response to these six pages that at least some of Dick Cheney’s CYA documents were written. And the detainee statements from their CSRTs? Maybe we’ll finally learn why Rahim al-Nashiri was only waterboarded two times.
I don’t think I’ve read a more succinct comment for why we need to find out what happened. Last week I told my older son that I had just read a book about the West Point class of 2002. It was a good book and the writer is a young fellow named Bill Murray Jr who had worked for Bob Woodward while Woodward was writing his books about Bush and his administration. If fact Murray has an article in this weeks Newsweek about the West Point class of 2009. Getting back to my son, he looked at me when I mentioned Murray’s book and he said can’t you read something a little less depressing like a novel? I didn’t answer him. I do know that I have been effected by Jane Mayer’s book “The Dark Side about torture of prisoners and it has made me feel very strongly that the people responsible need to be punished and that the people of our country can’t let this happen again.
ps I guess I should change my name from joy to constant misery. I don’t think I’m that bad but when I was born an identical twin my sister and I were premature so I cried a lot . My Dad would walk the floor with me at night trying to stop my crying and he told my Mom one night that he knew it was a mistake to name me Constance Joy so he told her to go to city hall in the morning and change my name from Constance Joy to Constance misery.