White House Wants to Redact the Hell Out of Torture Report. Will a Leaker Save Us?

The most transparent
administration ever has managed to infuriate the left’s top
national security state defender, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.),
even further. The CIA already drew her ire in a way even
libertarians can appreciate (and yet still laugh at) when they

snooped on staffers from the Senate Intelligence Committee as
they put together a massive report analyzing the CIA’s use of
torture under President George W. Bush. The CIA ended up
apologizing to her, and now there are calls to
dump CIA Director John Brennan after he initially scoffed at
Feinstein’s complaints.

Now, as the government considers unclassified just a small
portion of the full torture report, the 480 page “executive
summary,” she’s battling the White House and the CIA again over how
much of the report they want to take a black pen to. As a result,
we probably won’t be seeing the report anytime soon. Officials
defending the move say they’ve only redacted 15 percent of the
content. But that 15 percent matters. From
The Washington Post:

U.S. officials familiar with the redacted document said the
administration stripped out material that showed that pieces of
information long attributed to detainees — and that led to the
disruption of terrorism plots or the capture of additional suspects
— had actually come from other intelligence sources such as
intercepted communications.

“The redactions obscure or prevent the report from sharing other
forms of information that contributed to counterterrorism
successes,” said a U.S. official involved in discussions over the
document.

The committee used CIA-provided pseudonyms to protect the
identities of agency personnel, but the agency removed references
to those false identities. The CIA also objected to other details
that it said could enable readers to identify its officers as well
as countries that cooperated in the detention program.

An official familiar with the redactions said the amount of
detail associated with the pseudonyms could jeopardize CIA
officers’ safety. “A pseudonym itself is little protection from
exposure when a host of other information about that officer is
made available to the public and will likely be seen by adversaries
and foreign intelligence services,” the official said.

Maybe we’ll just have to wait for another whistleblower to leak
an unredacted copy to find out what’s really happening. We’ve drawn
attention to a
couple of
big scoops over at The Intercept about the contents of
the federal government’s terrorist watch list guidelines. The
information did not originate from Edward Snowden, and now the feds
have realized they may have another leaker on their hands. CNN
notes:

The article cites documents prepared by the National
Counterterrorism Center dated August 2013, which is after Snowden
left the United States to avoid criminal charges.

[Glenn] Greenwald has suggested there was another leaker. In
July, he said on Twitter “it seems clear at this point” that there
was another.

Government officials have been investigating to find out that
identity.

No doubt, they intend to thank him for all his or her good work
at making sure America remains a free and open country.