There Are Interviews with CIA Officials Regarding Torture, and the White House is Hiding Them

When the Senate’s
report on enhanced interrogation and torture was released
earlier this week, one of the immediate defensive talking points
from the CIA was that the Senate
did not interview any of their employees. The Senate report
makes note of this issue in a footnote, saying that the CIA
wouldn’t require its staff to cooperate and attributed it to a
Department of Justice investigation.

Just before that footnote is an additional note that the White
House also withheld thousands of documents from the Senate
investigation, claiming executive privilege. Brian Doherty
wrote about that detail Tuesday.

Apparently among those documents are interviews with about 100
witnesses with information about the interrogation program. The
New York Times has
filed a lawsuit to try to get access to these reports to see
why no charges have been filed as a result of the investigation.
The White House is fighting having to disclose the records:

The Obama administration has
urged a court to reject a request to disclose thousands of
pages of documents from a Justice Department investigation into the
torture of detainees by the Central Intelligence Agency, including
summaries of interviews with about 100 witnesses and documents
explaining why in the end no charges were filed

The administration made the filing late Tuesday in response to a
Freedom of Information Act
lawsuit brought by The New York Times, hours after the Senate
Intelligence Committee made public a 524-page executive summary of
its own investigation into C.I.A. torture. The committee based its
report on a review of C.I.A. documents but did not conduct any
interviews.

The Justice Department materials, the court filing revealed,
include 10 reports and memorandums totaling 1,719 pages — more than
three times the number of pages in the Senate report released
Tuesday — as well as “numerous” pages of reports on interviews with
current and former C.I.A. officials.

According to the Times, the Justice Department is
fighting the release of the documents because it would “affect the
candor of law enforcement deliberations about whether to bring
criminal charges.”

Read more
here. CIA Director John Brennan gave a press conference this
afternoon essentially going over the same points used in the
agency’s
official response (pdf) to the Senate report. When a reporter
asked him directly if he thought destroying video tapes of
interrogations had been appropriate, he vaguely responded that
people “took actions at the time that they believed were the right
thing to do. Let’s leave it at that.” If those are the kind of
responses to expect, what exactly were Senate staffers going to get
from their own interviews anyway?