CIA Fights Full Disclosure of Detainee Report : White House Urged to Maintain Secrecy

CIA Fights Full Disclosure of Detainee Report
White House Urged to Maintain Secrecy

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 17, 2009

The CIA is pushing the Obama administration to maintain the secrecy of significant portions of a comprehensive internal account of the agency's interrogation program, according to two intelligence officials.

The officials say the CIA is urging the suppression of passages describing in graphic detail how the agency handled its detainees, arguing that the material could damage ongoing counterterrorism operations by laying bare sensitive intelligence procedures and methods.

The May 2004 report, prepared by the CIA's inspector general, is the most definitive official account to date of the agency's interrogation system. A heavily redacted version, consisting of a dozen or so paragraphs separated by heavy black boxes and lists of missing pages, was released in May 2008 in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

After an ACLU appeal, the Obama administration promised in May to review the report, which consists of more than 100 pages of text and six appendixes of unknown length, and to produce by Friday any additional material that could be released.
...

A senior intelligence official who has studied the document defended the CIA's redactions. "There is a lot about how the CIA operated the overall program of detention and interrogation -- not just about how they used techniques -- that would be sensitive and rightly redacted," the official said.
"I think the Obama administration has made the correct decision that transparency only goes so far on the national security side."

Some former agency officials said that CIA insiders are fighting a rear-guard action to prevent disclosures that could embarrass the agency and lead to new calls for a so-called "truth commission" investigating the Bush administration's policies.

Two former agency officials who read the 2004 report said most of its contents could be safely released and, if anything, would seem familiar. ...

" Leon Panetta has been captured by the people who were the ideological drivers for the interrogation program in the first place," said a former senior officer who spoke on the condition of anonymity when discussing the still-classified report.

But one intelligence official countered that Panetta "was never a fan of the interrogation program."

"He's reached his own independent decisions on these issues. He's standing up for people who followed lawful guidance" issued to the agency during the Bush administration, the official said....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/16/AR2009061603516_pf.html