The Obama administration gave the green light for CIA Director Leon Panetta to file an affidavit in federal district court saying that the CIA doesn’t have to release documents pertaining to their "enhanced" interrogations on suspected terrorists. R. Jeffrey Smith of the Washington Post reports that the ACLU has battled five years for the CIA to release documents that are related to the 92 videotapes of detainee interrogations that the CIA destroyed in 2005 (a federal prosecutor is separately investigating this tape destruction). How come the Obama administration is not releasing the CIA documents after it released the Justice Dept. Office of Legal Counsel memos authorizing torture?
[Panetta] asked U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to draw a legal distinction between the administration’s release in April of Justice Department memos authorizing the harsh interrogations and the CIA’s desire to keep classified its own documents detailing the specific handling of detainees at its secret facilities overseas.
Panetta also uses the logic Barack Obama used when he chose not to release the photos of abused detainees: this will inflame anti-U.S. passion. But it seems that continued secrecy is actually what might fuel anti-U.S. sentiment. If Obama were fully transparent, the world might view "war on terror" abuses as resulting not from systemic problems in U.S. government and politics but the specific problems of George W. Bush’s reaction to 9/11. Panetta’s affidavit, though, suggests that a contempt for moral and legal boundaries is not a Bush or Obama problem but a CIA problem that transcends the policies and principals of whatever administration is in power.-MB
