Most Transparent Administration Ever Begging to Stop Release of Senate Torture Report

The Senate Intelligence
Committee’s extremely long, extremely embattled effort to produce a
report describing the methods and impact of the federal
government’s use of torture during the Iraq War is supposed to be
reaching an end. Beltway rumors were that the part of the report
intended for public review, a 600-page executive summary, was
supposed to be released next week.

But that’s not going to happen if the Obama administration has
its way. Secretary of State John Kerry has been deployed to beg Sen
Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) to continue delaying the report’s
release, despite the administration’s official public support. The
information comes from Josh Rogin at
Bloomberg View:

Kerry was not going rogue — his call came after an
interagency process that decided the release of the report early
next week, as
Feinstein had been planning,  could complicate
relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed
an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad.
 Kerry told Feinstein he still supports releasing the report,
just not right now.

“What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is
going on in the world — including parts of the world particularly
implicated — and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications
were being appropriately factored into timing,” an administration
official told me.  “He had a responsibility to do so because
this isn’t just an intel issue — it’s a foreign policy issue.”

But those concerns are not new, and Kerry’s 11th-hour effort to
secure a delay in the report’s release places Feinstein in a
difficult position: She must decide whether to set aside the
administration’s concerns and accept the risk, or scuttle the
roll-out of the investigation she fought for years to preserve.

Remember, Feinstein will not be head of the intel committee for
much longer. She’s losing her leadership as of next week thanks to
the results of the November election that will bring in a
Republican Senate. Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) will be taking over
as chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee and he’s
openly critical of Feinstein’s hindsight-oriented leadership
and is not a fan of transparency. If Feinstein agrees with the
administration’s request it could potentially result in the torture
report’s release being delayed for years. Or you know, forever,
since there will never be a time where “foreign policy
implications” will not be a factor in the release of a report about
the United States torturing the citizens of other countries to get
information.

Read more about the wrangling about the report from Rogin

here and how the CIA engaged in illegal surveillance on Senate
staffers while they were putting together the report
here. And then think for a minute about the administration is
trying to turn its own party’s loss in the midterms as a way to be
less transparent to the American people about what the government
has done in their name.

UPDATE: According to a tweet from Shawna
Thomas at NBC, the State Department is denying trying to delay
the report’s release.

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