White House Has Its Own Way of Screwing with Senate Torture Probe – Ignoring It

Yesterday, when White House
spokesman Jay Carney was asked about the Senate Intelligence
Committee and the CIA accusing essentially accusing each other of
illegal hacking* he made it clear that the White House
knew what was going on but was staying out of the fight. Given
that the White House is the head of the executive branch, their
attempt to try to be a neutral party in this scandal is an odd,
possibly untenable choice (or cynically, yet another way for this
administration from having to hold anybody accountable for
anything).

As reporters from McClatchy’s Washington bureau explain, though,
the White House is assuredly not a neutral party in this fight over
the Senate Intelligence Committee’s effort to independently probe
the details of the CIA’s detention and torture techniques under the
Bush administration. The way the White House is interfering with
the probe is very simple – they’re just
flat out refusing to give the Senate committee some of the info
it’s asking for:

The White House has been withholding for five years more than
9,000 top-secret documents sought by the Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence for its investigation into the now-defunct CIA
detention and interrogation program, even though President Barack
Obama hasn’t exercised a claim of executive privilege.

In contrast to public assertions that it supports the
committee’s work, the White House has ignored or rejected offers in
multiple meetings and in letters to find ways for the committee to
review the records, a McClatchy investigation has found.

The significance of the materials couldn’t be learned. But the
administration’s refusal to turn them over or to agree to any
compromise raises questions about what they would reveal about the
CIA’s use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques
on suspected terrorists in secret overseas prisons.

The White House responded to McClatchy’s inquiries that the
pages withheld raise issues of “executive branch confidentiality
interests,” but McClatchy notes the president hasn’t formally
claimed the documents are exempt due to executive privilege. They
are nevertheless refusing to hand them over. Read McClatchy’s
investigation
here.  

* Simplified explanation for the sake of brevity. Read all the
complicated details
here.