Another Delay in the CIA Inspector General Torture Report
Remember how the Justice Department was supposed to declassify the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the “enhanced interrogation program” today? Not going to happen. There’s continued legal wrangling over how much to declassify. The latest I’ve heard is that the declassification could happen tomorrow — happy Fourth of July! — or perhaps next week. My understanding is that White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs made some comments to that effect at his press briefing this afternoon, but I was out at a thing and haven’t seen the transcript yet. More soon.
Update: OK, got the relevant section of the Gibbs briefing. Long story short: probably not going to be released this week, as there’s an ongoing interagency fight over how much can be declassified. Gibbs:
“„Obviously some of the information that’s out now can — you can go back now through the older IG report — in a sense, I don’t know if this is a word, “unredact” some of that material. That’s what — I think that’s a decent part of what’s going on interagency-wise right now.
The IG report was actually “released” in May 2008 but was almost entirely redacted. If it can’t be *unredacted, *then it can’t actually be released in any substantive fashion.
