The release of the long-awaited CIA inspector general report on torture has been postponed once again.
The ACLU, which is suing to have the report released, just announced that the government is asking for yet another postponement on the date of the report's release -- this time, until August 31. The CIA had earlier said it would release the report June 19. That was then pushed back to June 26, and then again to July 1.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised at this point. But the latest example of the Obama administration mimicking the Bushies in opting for secrecy over openness feels like one of the most infuriating yet.
The Justice Department is declining to release Dick Cheney's interview with federal investigators looking into the Valerie Plame leak, arguing -- as it did under President Bush -- that doing so would discourage future high-level officials from cooperating with criminal investigations.
Rep. John Conyers, who chairs the House Judiciary committee, has played a prominent role in recent years exposing executive-branch muck, from the US Attorneys scandal to torture. So it's ironic that Conyers' wife is caught up in some serious muck of her own.
The scandal has been brewing for a while, but it reached boiling point Monday, when Rayford Jackson, a Detroit businessman, admitted in a plea deal with prosecutors that he had bribed a council member in 2007, to gain approval for a $1.2-billion waste disposal contract. The Detroit Free Press had previously reported that the council member in question, described in court documents, is Monica Conyers.
Add another (perhaps more minor) entry to the list of ways in which the Obama administration is mimicking its predecessor on issues of transparency.
MSNBC.com reports that the Secret Service has denied the news outlet's request for the names of visitors to the White House since President Obama was sworn in. It also denied a narrower request by the good-government group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington for records of visits by coal executives.
It's looking more and more like Barack Obama's pledge to usher in a new era of openness in government may well go unfulfilled.
Yesterday, administration lawyers cited national security concerns to argue that Bush-era documents detailing the videotaped interrogations of detainees should not be released. And in the wake of that news, open-government advocates are reluctantly acknowledging that, despite Obama's campaign promises, his approach to secrecy on issues of national security will likely not depart significantly from that of George Bush.
Do we have yet another case of the Obama administration mimicking its predecessor's notorious penchant for government secrecy?
The CIA argued yesterday that Bush-era documents detailing the videotaped interrogations of detainees should not be released, citing national security concerns, reports the Washington Post.
For years now, torture supporters have been using the "ticking time-bomb" scenario to argue that it's irresponsible to issue a blanket ban on torture. If we knew that a bomb was set to explode imminently, goes the argument, and that torture could help obtain information to avert the disaster and save hundreds of lives, who wouldn't do it?
This has always borne more relation to an episode of 24 than to the actual war on terror. Even torture supporters have admitted that no such ticking time-bomb case has ever occurred. But it looks like we may now be confronted with a version of it in a very different context -- and this time, it's hard not to notice that those same torture supporters don't seem to be rushing to call for the waterboard just yet.
But the Times also, to its credit, released Comey's emails in full, allowing us all to make our own judgments about what they show. And after a close look at the emails, it seems clear that the paper could have used them to write a very different story -- with a very different effect on the public debate.
Now this is some chutzpah....
You might remember that a few years ago, Washington's Republicans were all up in arms over the fact that classified information about the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program had been leaked to the New York Times. The Justice Department began an investigation into the leak, and congressional GOPers gravely declared what a serious crime this was.
The Washington Post reports today that, during 2005, Dick Cheney sat in on several of those CIA torture briefings, in an effort to persuade wavering lawmakers to keep backing the torture program.
The news doesn't really come as a shock -- indeed, some close observers had already guessed that the then-veep was involved in the briefings. But it does add to the picture of Cheney embarking during the middle years of the Bush administration on a focused, stealthy campaign to make sure the US didn't give up what he saw as its right to torture.
General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander of coalition forces in Iraq, has added a bit more detail to his claim last night that his soldiers were "abandoned on the battlefield" by civilian leaders in the Bush administration.
Speaking this afternoon to CNN's Rick Sanchez (no relation), General Sanchez repeated the charge that he and his soldiers were abandoned on the battlefield on the issue of harsh interrogations. General Sanchez explained that this occurred "because of a lack of policy guidance, a lack of structure, a lack of training." He added: "And even when commanders were asking for this help, it didn't come."
As we told you yesterday, General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, called Sunday night for a truth commission to investigate torture, and declared that the practice never produced actionable intelligence.
And last night, speaking to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, Sanchez repeated his call for the commission. He added that, in the aftermath of the effort, "we must have all options open, from commendation to prosecution," so that we can "move forward and regain the moral high ground that we have lost."
General Ricardo Sanchez, the former top coalition commander in Iraq, has called for a truth commission to investigate abusive interrogation practices.
At an event last night at the Times Center in New York City, reports the Huffington Post, Sanchez blamed the Abu Ghraib abuses on a failure of civilian and military command at all levels, declaring "and that is why I support the formation of a truth commission."
Last week, the Daily Telegraph reported that, according to the retired major general who led a probe into torture at Abu Ghraib, some of the photos whose release the Obama administration is trying to block in the ACLU's lawsuit show rape and sexual abuse by members of the US armed forces.
The administration quickly and strongly denied that the photos in the lawsuit showed such acts -- but appeared not to rule out the possibility that other photos did, prompting speculation that the Telegraph might have gotten its photos mixed up.
Over at TPMDC, we posted video of a speech given Wednesday night by Sen. Carl Levin, in which he pushed back against Dick Cheney's no-middle-ground approach to torture.
But one specific rebuttal of Levin's that particularly stood out, in part because not enough people have challenged Cheney's claim, comes at the 3:53 mark.
Says Levin:
When former Vice President Cheney said last week that what happened at Abu Ghraib was the work of a quote few sadistic prison guards acting on their own, he bore false witness.And when he said last week there was no link between the techniques at Abu Ghraib and those approved for use in the CIA's secret prisons, he again strayed from the truth.
The seeds of Abu Ghraib's rotten fruit were sown by civilians at the highest levels of our government.
Hard to put it better than that.
Watch:
We've told you in recent months about the Obama administration's disappointing tendency to mimic some of its predecessor's more troubling war-on-terror tactics. But is the administration's approach to public relations another area to add to the list?
Yesterday's aggressive push-back against the Daily Telegraph report on torture photos suggests it could be.
Do the Abu Ghraib torture photos that President Obama wants to keep secret show even worse crimes that we've yet known about?
Major General Antonio Taguba, the former army officer who, in a 2004 probe, documented widespread detainee abuse at the prison, has told The Daily Telegraph: "These pictures show torture, abuse, rape and every indecency."
Amazing as it seems, there was a time not so long ago, when people were talking about a very different potential first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice: Alberto Gonzales. That never came to pass, of course. But it hasn't stopped Gonzo from using the Sotomayor nomination to get himself back in the media spotlight, making the rounds on cable news to discuss the historic moment.
Still, we can't help but feel there's a longer-term agenda behind the ex-AG's recent media tour. Call it the self-rehabilitation of Alberto Gonzales.
Yet more evidence that the CIA may not have been totally up front with Nancy Pelosi during that contested torture briefing from 2002...
A former "deep-cover" CIA operative tells CQ's Jeff Stein that agency briefers often hide facts or shade the truth. "They mumble, they dissemble, and there's a lot of 'on the one hand... '" said the operative, who has written harsh critiques of the CIA, under the pen-name Ishmael Jones.
TPMmuckraker favorite Alberto Gonzales went on CNN this afternoon to talk Sotomayor.
But Wolf Blitzer also asked him about the ongoing torture debate. And it was interesting to see that Gonzo -- who was White House counsel at the time the torture policies were first formulated -- seemed eager to shift any blame onto the Justice Department he would later go on to lead.
Pressed by Blitzer about his role in approving torture, he first clarified that he wasn't at the Justice Department at the key time, and said "It's the responsibility of the Department of Justice to provide legal guidance on behalf of the executive branch."
In other words: blame Ashcroft, Yoo, and Bybee.
Of course, it's unclear how that stance lines up with a report that Gonzo, while at the White House, personally signed off on CIA requests to conduct torture.
Gonzo also assured Blitzer: "I stand by my record," and "I did my best to defend our country."
Watch:
This came out a few weeks ago, but it's worth taking note of: We've told you about the Obama administration's frequent invocations of the state secrets claim in domestic national security cases -- mimicking the Bush administration. But it now appears the administration is going further by leaning on our allies to adopt a similar approach.
Binyam Mohamed, who was released from Guantanamo in February, claims he was tortured into confessing to bombing plots, and that the British government is complicit in the torture, for feeding questions to the CIA.
Conservative radio host Eric "Mancow" Muller decided to have himself waterboarded to show it's no big deal.
His response after enduring several seconds of having water poured on his face?
"It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that's no joke." He added: "Had I known that it was that bad I wouldn't have done this ... I don't want to say this: absolutely torture."
Watch:
And remember: this was in a controlled setting where the victim knew he wasn't going to be harmed.
You've got to hand it to Karen Hughes. She fights for what she believes in.
The former top Bush adviser talked torture in a recent interview with the Houston Chronicle:
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