Shorter Panetta: Covering Up Our Sins Is Better Than Coming Clean

By Steve Hynd

The Obama administration and the CIA are yet again objecting to the release of Bush-era documents relating to the interrogation by torture of detainees in U.S. custody.

Marcy Wheeler at FDL has the full, credibility destroying, affadavit by CIA Director Leon E. Panetta (PDF here), which describes the documents:

These Top Secret communications consist primarily of sensitive intelligence and operational information concerning Abu Zubaydah. Drafted during the timeframe the interrogations were being conducted, these communications are the most contemporaneous documents the CIA possesses concerning these interrogations. In addition to these Top Secret communications, there are also a small number of miscellaneous documents, which include the notes of CIA employees who reviewed the 92 videotoapes before they were destroyed, logbooks containing details of the interrogations, and a photograph.

Marcy is scathingly accurate:

a little unsolicited advice for the spook-in-chief. When you say, 

I also want to emphasize that my determinations expressed above, and in my classified declaration, are in no way driven by a desire to prevent embarrassment for the U.S. Government or the CIA, or to suppress evidence of unlawful conduct,

Yet the entire world knows--and the CIA has itself acknowledged--that the materials in question do, in fact, show evidence of unlawful conduct, and when you sort of kind of pretend that no one else knows what they all know--that the materials show evidence of unlawful conduct...

Then you look like a fool. A chump. Like George Tenet, maybe, when he boasted of "slam dunk."

While Spencer Ackerman notes Panetta's claim that disclosure could help could use the contents to evade questions in the future and notes:

how can al-Qaeda detainees learn how to evade questioning from descriptions of techniques that the Obama administration has forsworn? This is the sort of move that suggests that remnants of the so-called "enhanced interrogation" program are going to live on, speeches in Cairo promising new beginnings notwithstanding.

But Dan Froomkin has the best of today's comment on this tranparent attempt to cover up criminality by the previous administration.

In his May 21 national security address, Obama vowed that he would "not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassment to the government."

But what's emerging is an exception to the rule. The Obama administration apparently won't hide things from the public just because they're embarrassing -- unless they're really, really embarrassing.

...the CIA should have thought of all this a long time ago -- ideally, before they embarked on actions whose disclosure alone would be enough to incite our enemies.

...The cable traffic, the logbooks and the written reports about the destroyed videotapes would give the American public a much better and more definitive view of not just what was going on in these CIA prisons, but where the pressure was really coming from to abandon tried-and-true interogation methods in favor of brutality.

Just a few weeks ago, for instance, NPR's Ari Shapiro reported that on a nearly daily basis in mid-2002, a CIA contractor would "write a top-secret cable to the CIA's counterterrorism center" requesting permission for various techniques to be used on Zubaydah. The CIA, Shapiro reported, "would then forward the request to the White House, where White House counsel Alberto Gonzales would sign off on the technique." It wasn't until months later, on August 1, 2002, that the Justice Department issued its official authorization. Comparing what was said in the cables to what the Justice Department lawyers presented as fact in their memos would also be telling.

But, as I wrote last month, the president who came into office promising to restore our international reputation and return responsibility to government now seems to be buying into the belief that covering up our sins is better than coming clean.

Indeed.