The Case of the Missing Torture Documents

[kentuck]

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/09/case-missing-torture-documents

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Classified Bush-era documents on the administration's controversial interrogation and rendition programs are missing, according to a recent court filing submitted by the Obama Justice Department. But a Justice Department spokeswoman says the documents may not actually be gone; they may never have existed—even though Bush administration records say that they do. Welcome to the Case of the Disappearing Torture Documents. This is more than just a bureaucratic whodunit. There's a possibility that government officials purposely destroyed records pertaining to detainee abuse.

Here's what happened: In 2007, the Bush administration was fighting a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which was seeking records related to the deaths of detainees, their treatment, and the administration's rendition policies. CIA lawyers drew up a list of 181 documents that they considered exempt from release. Some of these records, which were stored in a secure facility, were so sensitive that Justice Department lawyers lacked the clearances to handle them.

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After President Obama took office, he issued a new FOIA policy, instructing executive branch agencies to "adopt a presumption in favor" of releasing information. The Obama Justice Department reprocessed the ACLU's earlier request under the new guidelines. But when they did so, department officials discovered that 10 documents listed on the index compiled by the Bush administration were nowhere to be found. The Justice Department noted this in a filing by David Barron, an acting assistant attorney general, which was submitted last week as part of the ongoing ACLU case and first highlighted by Firedoglake blogger Marcy Wheeler. Barron acknowledged in the filing that even more documents could be missing, because "many" of the documents the Obama team did find were "not certain matches" to the ones on the Bush administration's list.

"It was impossible to ascertain whether the discrepancy was the result of an error by the prior administration when it created the original…index or whether the prior administration misplaced the documents in question," Tracy Schmaler, a Justice Department spokeswoman, told Mother Jones. In other words, CIA and Justice Department lawyers might have mistakenly listed documents that never existed in the first place.

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[nosmokes]

1. and the longer this drags on w/o full scale investigations into what went on

during the bushco years the more we'll never know.