It is occurring to more than a few people that President Joe Biden is pretty much free to do anything he wants within the law for the rest of his term. (For that matter, if we take the Supreme Court seriously, he's pretty much free to do anything he wants, the law be damned. Take that immunity thing out for a spin and see what she's got.) For example, the indefatigable Jefferson Morley is ramping up his campaign for the CIA to release all the remaining documents regarding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, something that was supposed to happen 32 years ago.
Elsewhere, the Freedom of the Press Foundation has an equally reasonable request, albeit one that our new friends, the Cheneys of Wyoming, may find inconvenient. They want the president to declassify and release the long-buried Senate committee report concerning the torture program on which the government embarked in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. From the Foundation:
The outgoing Biden administration should commemorate the 23rd anniversary of the terrorist attacks by ordering the declassification of the Senate’s report on the CIA’s torture program. A fitting date for the declassification to be completed is Sept. 11, 2026 — the 25th anniversary of the attacks. This would not only help the public hold the government accountable for abhorrent human rights violations but would counter overwhelming evidence that the CIA has become too powerful for oversight.
The Senate report came out of then-Senator Dianne Feinstein's anger at learning that CIA officials had destroyed key evidence about the torture program. This investigation set off a low-level war between Feinstein's committee and the intelligence community. It was not pretty at all.
The Senate Intelligence Committee voted to broaden its investigation beyond the videotape destruction in 2009, with Senate staff ultimately reviewing over 6 million pages of records across five years and producing the 6,700-page report.This mammoth achievement was accomplished in spite of the CIA 1) misleading Congress and the White House about the program, 2) pushing misleading narratives about the torture program to the media, and 3) spying on Senate staff who were attempting to conduct oversight of the program. (After first denying it even happened, former CIA director John Brennan eventually apologized for the spying, but the agency and responsible officials faced no meaningful disciplinary measures).
Brennan, who spied on congressional investigators, is another one of our new TV friends. We're hanging around with some very shady characters these days.
What followed were several futile attempts to get the report released. One of the more aggressive attempts was undertaken by then-Senator Mark Udall of Colorado. In an eerie parallel to our current situation, Udall was defeated for re-election in 2014. Rumors flew that, taking advantage of Congress' speech-and-debate clause, Udall planned to read all 6700 pages of the report into the Congressional Record. Instead, on December 10, 2014, Udall rose in the Senate and read Brennan, the CIA, and the Obama Administration for filth over their attempts to short-circuit Feinstein's investigation and then hand-wave the findings into oblivion. Burgess Everett of Politico was on the scene as Udall went off.
Just last week, Udall was threatening to spill the executive summary of a long investigation into the CIA’s interrogation practices on the Senate floor if the White House and Senate Democrats could not agree on a suitably redacted version of the report, an “all-options-are-on-the-table” stance that transparency advocates credited with forcing the administration’s hand.
Though the executive summary of the report with some redactions was released on Tuesday, Udall went beyond that document Wednesday by disclosing aspects of a controversial, separate internal CIA review that remains classified. In detailing the so-called Panetta review, Udall seemed to step into a gray area regarding release of sensitive national security information. A Udall spokesman said later that no classified information was released. Lawmakers rarely make public disclosures of classified information without executive branch approval, though such a revelation cannot be prosecuted if done during official legislative debate.
It's time to open all the windows—on JFK, and especially on torture, because there are still living people that we can shame and, if necessary, prosecute. We can look forward and not back, but that doesn't mean we're actually moving forward. It means we're stuck. immobile in a past that, as Eugene O'Neill warned us, keeps happening, over and over again, now.
