Word comes today that, shockingly, the Justice department has requested yet another delay in declassifying the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the “enhanced interrogation program." It is as of yet unclear when it will be released, but there was this from today's White House briefing.
MR. GIBBS: I think -- here's what I know of the report, and I would refer you to DOJ because I think part of this is obviously based on Freedom of Information Act litigation involving the ACLU and in some ways an outcropping of what you saw in the OLC memos that were released earlier this year in the President's term.
It's my understanding that the interagency review of the document and what can be released is continuing and I don't anticipate that that's going to be released today.
Q Today? This week?
MR. GIBBS: It's my understanding that it's doubtful that it will be released this week.
Q Doubtful. And this interagency review process, is part of it to increase the amount of information that's available? Obviously the first report was almost thoroughly redacted. Is part of that process, part of the delay, to make this as transparent as possible or is it principally legal issues --
MR. GIBBS: Well, I would say it's a -- in some ways, it's a combination. Obviously part of this report, as I said, is an outcropping of that Freedom of Information Act litigation that resulted in the release of the OLC memos. Obviously some of the information that's out now can -- you can go back now through the older IG report -- in a sense, I don't know if this is a word, "unredact" some of that material. That's what -- I think that's a decent part of what's going on interagency-wise right now.
So we wait. Some more. There's still the possibility that Justice is waiting for a convenient holiday weekend, late Friday news dump. Or it could come much later, as Gibbs seems to indicate could happen. That will depend in part on how receptive the judge and the ACLU will be to ckicking this can down the raod even further.
While we wait, it's worth reading another addition to the ACLU Accountability Project blogger effort to highlight the cases in which torture was taken to the extreme, and resulted in some 100 detainee deaths. Andy Worthington writes "When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan."
On Friday, I also wrote an article about torture for the ACLU’s Accountability Project, explaining how the hunger strikers at Guantánamo are part of the same torture machine — and, moreover, one that, unnervingly, is still operating today — but as a contribution to the specific topic of demonstrating to the US public, and the wider world, that torture techniques implemented by the Bush administration led to murders in US custody, I’m presenting below some relevant sections from my book The Guantánamo Files, from testimony provided by former prisoner Omar Deghayes, and from a recent report by investigator John Sifton, relating to ten murders in US prisons in Afghanistan, three of which, to the best of my knowledge, have never been investigated at all.
Following the outline proposed by Glenn Greenwald above, some of these murders may have involved a few “rogue” actions, but in general it’s clear that they followed methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House — or variations introduced in a context where limits on abusive behavior had been reduced or eliminated, ostensibly to facilitate interrogation.
The prelude to two notorious murders — and, very possibly, three others — in the US prison at Bagram airbase began in the summer of 2002, when 14 soldiers from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg arrived at the prison, led by Lt. Carolyn Wood, and were soon joined by six Arabic-speaking reservists from the Utah National Guard. Lt. Wood took over interrogations from a team led by an interrogator who later wrote a book about his experiences, The Interrogators, using the pseudonym Chris Mackey. This is how I described what happened next in The Guantánamo Files:
Go read the whole thing. Then check out the ACLU Accountability Project to find out how to demand accountability for torture, for homicide.
