The White House Has Been Covering Up the Presidency’s Role in Torture for Years

~~On May 10, 2013, John Brennan presented CIA’s response to the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report to the President.

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PICTURE UNAVAILABLE

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 The fight between the CIA and the Senate Intelligence Committee over the Committee’s Torture Report – which Dan Froomkin covered here – has now zeroed in on the White House.

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 Did the White House order the CIA to withdraw 920 documents from a server made available to Committee staffers, as Senator Dianne Feinstein says the agency claimed in 2010? Were those documents – perhaps thousands of them – pulled in deference to a White House claim of executive privilege, as Senator Mark Udall and then CIA General Counsel Stephen Preston suggested last fall?

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 And is the White House continuing to withhold 9,000 pages of documents without invoking privilege, as McClatchy reported yesterday?

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 We can be sure about one thing: The Obama White House has covered up the Bush presidency’s role in the torture program for years. Specifically, from 2009 to 2012, the administration went to extraordinary lengths to keep a single short phrase, describing President Bush’s authorization of the torture program, secret.

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 Some time before October 29, 2009, then National Security Advisor Jim Jones filed an ex parte classified declaration with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, in response to a FOIA request by the ACLU seeking documents related to the torture program. In it, Jones argued that the CIA should not be forced to disclose the “source of the CIA’s authority,” as referenced in the title of a document providing “Guidelines for Interrogations” and signed by then CIA Director George Tenet. That document was cited in two Justice Department memos at issue in the FOIA. Jones claimed that “source of authority” constituted an intelligence method that needed to be protected.

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Redacted phrase describing authorization for torture

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The Obama Administration successfully appealed a judge’s ruling to release the redacted part of this title describing under what authorities torture was conducted. Document obtained by ACLU under FOIA.

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 As other documents and reporting have made clear, the source of authority was a September 17, 2001 Presidential declaration authorizing not just detention and interrogation, but a range of other counterterrorism activities, including targeted killings.

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Read more here- White House COVER-UP

http://generalstrikeusa.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-white-house-has-been-covering-up.html