CIA Urges Judge To Keep Bush-Era Documents Sealed
There are records of 92 video tapes of interrogation. The videos themselves were destroyed in 2005, but the Obama administration is pushing to keep the transcripts of those videos sealed.
All the promises of transparency from the new administration make it that much more infurating to see that when it comes to actual, important documentation about our previous administration's war crimes, we can't be allowed to see them. Their defense is the usual:
The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts.
The administration continues to miss the point. In the Bush years, we broke US and international law, and it's critical to find out what happened and just how bad it was. It was Obama himself who said in the Cairo speech:
I cannot ignore these rulings because as President, I too am bound by the law. The United States is a nation of laws and so we must abide by these rulings.
It seems that those laws only matter when it's convenient. Otherwise we might just embolden those terrorists.