As Glenn Greenwald and Jane Hamsher have reported, progressive Congressional Democrats are pushing back against the efforts of the Senate and the Obama White House to cover up the crimes of the last administration. It's time to reward good behavior and encourage the Congresspeople to hold firm and continue to say "no" to the memory hole.
Some background:
Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Joe Lieberman (CFL-CT) have successfully attached the Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009 (there's a name for you...those poor photos just need our protection!) as an amendment to a supplemental appropriations bill. The purpose of the Amendment is to prevent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests from being used to reveal the infamous photographs of US torture of detainees whose publication the Obama administration has been attempting to suppress.
The Obama administration has enthusiastically supported the Graham-Lieberman amendment. This puts the lie to the 11th-Dimensional Chess® understanding of the Obama administration's decision not to release the photographs, which claimed that Obama just wanted to be forced to do so by the courts. The whole point of the Graham-Lieberman amendment is to make this impossible. Sometimes a coverup is simply a coverup.
When the amendment passed the Senate, most assumed that the conference committee would roll over and that this special, get-out-of-FOIA-free card would become law. But the House isn't going along. Progressive Democrats, led by Barney Frank, are refusing to vote for any bill that contains the amendment. And Republican opposition to the base supplemental appropriation bill means that they have enough votes to kill it.
The Obama administration is now trying to put the screws on Congressional Democrats who are not willing to go along with coverup. It's up to us to make sure that the progressive Democrats in the House win this fight.
We need thirty-nine Democrats to vote "nay" to block passage of this law. Firedoglake has set up a special Citizen Whip page that lists key Democratic members of Congress and asks us to call them, encourage them to vote "nay," and to report their responses back to FDL.
To move on from the crimes of the last eight years, we need a complete, public accounting of them, not more coverups. Please go to the Citizen Whip page and do your part to ensure that the photos are not thrown down the memory hole.
UPDATE: Bonus Hypocrisy Points courtesy of Sec. of State Hillary Clinton who today, on the twentieth anniversary of the Tienanmen Square protests, demanded that China "examine openly the darker events of its past and provide a public accounting of those killed, detained or missing, both to learn and to heal."