That "holy grail" CIA torture report that is reportedly wil undercut claims that torture provided any useful intelligence, the one that was supposed to have been released yesterday, and a few weeks before that, might be held now until August 31.
At least, that's what the administration has requested. The ACLU, the organization that brought the FOIA case which resulted in the order that the document be released will challenge that request. Spencer has the details, including the documents:
The Justice Department argues that the volume of material it needs to go through in the CIA’s 2004 inspector general report is just too great to meet any pre-August 31 timetable. Not only is the IG report itself 200 pages, that’s just one of 319 documents under review as part of the case.
The ACLU replies that the CIA and the Justice Department have already missed three deadlines for the agreed-upon disclosure, and lawyer Amrit Singh writes that she’s “disturbed by the clear trend emerging in the government’s repeated delays in disclosure of documents critical to a complete understanding of the CIA’s interrogation program.” She says that instead of delaying, Judge Alvin Hellerstein should order the “expediting the reprocessing and release of all CIA documents at issue.”
Spencer also has this statement from the ACLU's national security chief Jameel Jaffer:
The CIA has already had more than five months to review the inspector general’s report, and the report is only about two hundred pages long. We’re increasingly troubled that the Obama administration is suppressing documents that would provide more evidence that the CIA’s interrogation program was both ineffective and illegal. President Obama should not allow the CIA to determine whether evidence of its own unlawful conduct should be made available to the public. The public has a right to know what took place in the CIA’s secret prisons and on whose authority.
It's hard to see what a delay of two months will necessarily gain the administration given, as Jaffer points out, they've already had five months to try to figure out what to do about it. The predictable response was just what they got, the ACLU upped the ante by requesting that all of the CIA documents that are pending release be expedited. At this point, the report is going to be damaging no matter what--damage likely intensified by the efforts to delay its release.
Stay tuned for the court's response, probably after the holiday weekend.
