Tomgram: Karen Greenberg on Bush's Redacted Reality
Imagine a government in which the names of those who worked as key aides in the office of the second (if not, arguably, the first) most important official in the country were not available. Oh gosh, there is such a government -- and it's ours. Journalist Robert Dreyfuss set out to do a report for the American Prospect magazine on the various individuals Vice President Cheney had gathered to help him run the most powerful vice-presidency in American history -- functionally, his own shadow National Security Council -- and when he called, asking for those names and their positions as well as possible interviews with them, here's what ensued:
We're talking, of course, about the official to whom no major media outlet assigns a regular reporter, because the Veep's office releases, with great determination, no news to cover. Dick Cheney is, in this way, the poster boy for the Bush administration's most essential "sunshine" policy -- if at all possible, offer nothing to anyone, any time, anywhere, for any reason.
Such examples of Bush administration secrecy can be multiplied more or less in the direction of the infinite. Stories of information suppression of all sorts are legion, but sometimes one image is worth a thousand examples of what's being kept from us. In this case, the image comes from Karen J. Greenberg, co-editor of The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib, who follows the endless stream of investigations and reports that have come from inside the U.S. government and the military in response to the plethora of scandals about torture, abuse, mistreatment, kidnapping, secret prisons, and the like. Tom
The Color of "Transparency" Is Black
By Karen J. GreenbergImagine 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 the 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 of 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, Brigadier General Richard P. Formica had delivered his findings on command and control questions and allegations of detainee abuse in Iraq. Lieutenant General 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 or not U.S. forces in Iraq were in compliance with Department of Defense guidelines on detainee treatment.
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