1 Boring Old Man

Incoming: More Torture Documents

Despite the Obama administration’s best attempts to block the release of key documents and photographs – and otherwise stymie investigations into the Bush torture legacy – it looks like some more significant disclosures are coming down the pike.

Scott Shane writes in the New York Times that:

Mr. Obama cannot control the courts, and lawsuits are turning out to be the force driving disclosures about brutal interrogations….

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.

It’s really hard to overstate how much we still don’t know about the post-9/11 abuses of the Bush regime. But every little bit counts. These may be big bits. And as Shane reports, there’s yet more on deck.

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.