Deleting Torture with a Pen -- SF Chronicle

[AtomicKitten]

San Francisco Chronicle
Deleting torture with a pen
Solid blocks of black obscure official reports

Karen J. Greenberg

Sunday, July 23, 2006

Excerpts:

Imagine my disappointment. Two long-awaited Pentagon reports on detainee policy had finally reached public view: the Jacoby report on Afghanistan and the Formica report on Iraq, available as a result of Freedom of Information Act suits, like thousands of other pages of government reports on the war on terror. As co-editor of "The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib," a collection of the memos, reports and interview logs related to Bush administration detainee policy, I was naturally eager to see those parts of the story that were unfortunately still classified at the time of the book's publication in December 2004.

Both reports promised to contain new information about detainee policy. In June 2004, Brigadier General Charles H. Jacoby Jr. had submitted the results of his investigation into detainee operations and standards of detainee treatment in Afghanistan. In November of that year, Brig. Gen. Richard P. Formica had delivered his findings on questions of command and control and allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq. Lt. Gen. Richard Sanchez, commander of the Multinational Force in Iraq and the military officer connected to the interrogation unit at Abu Ghraib, had commissioned Formica to determine whether U.S. forces in Iraq were in compliance with Department of Defense guidelines on detainee treatment.

Now, a mere two years or so later, I began skimming through the introductory matter and the boldface headings of the Jacoby report. I stopped first at "Detainee Operations Standard Operating Procedures." Here it was in black and white, or so I thought. But, as it happened, I was only half right. Startling amounts of the report were blacked out. Where there should have been text against white space, there was section after section filled with nothing but solid, black blocks. Even some subsection titles were missing. Pure ink. Meant not to be read.

For example, when, in my haste, I reached the subsection titled "Interrogation Techniques," there was a black blot of ink two pages long. I couldn't help myself: I almost automatically lifted the paper to see beneath the overlay of ink. But, of course, that was a hopeless thought. Whatever information had been there was gone, eradicated, tossed down the public memory hole that has eaten so much of the detail that I, along with many others, have been trying to find for two years now.

Still, I plowed doggedly on, ever deeper into both of the reports, as the redacted sections only increased, leaving me with two "reports" that lacked, by my rough estimate, at least 50 percent of their contents.

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And yet, as in so much else with the Bush administration, if it weren't for angry, frustrated or horrified leakers from within the military, the intelligence community and the federal bureaucracy generally, we might truly be plunged into informational darkness. Part of the aura of secrecy the Bush administration has created around its own behavior involves the insistence that only agreed-upon administration officials can tell their story and only in the administration's way -- and often only as a last resort.

It's not surprising that the more reports on treatment (or mistreatment) of detainees around the world appear, the less they bother to offer us the light of day; the more all-black pages that enter the world, the less the public knows -- except perhaps about the nature of the Bush administration itself. Shrouded in secrecy, adamant about its right to not reveal, the administration stands defiantly behind its darkened pages. And so here we stand, too, the text of our world increasingly unreadable as words turn into massive inkblots and as the black spaces overcome the white ones. The dark, it seems, continues to swallow the light.

complete piece at http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/23/INGURK0MSQ1.DTL

[mtnsnake]

1. I'm sure we'd be shocked if we could ever read the blacked-out parts...

Very scary stuff indeed.

Please check your inbox.

[crim son]

2. "Freedom of information" has gone the way of all other

freedoms under the Pretzel Administration.