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December 11, 2009 BBC World

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI shares "the outrage, betrayal and shame" felt by Irish Catholics over cases of clerical sexual abuse and the way abuse claims were handled by church leaders, and he plans to write a special pastoral letter to the Catholics of Ireland, the Vatican said.

Pope Benedict, the statement said, "was deeply disturbed and distressed" by the contents of a report by an independent Commission of Investigation, headed by Judge Yvonne Murphy, which looked at the handling of some 325 abuse claims in the Archdiocese of Dublin in the years 1975-2004.

The report concluded that during those years, rather than being concerned about the victims, Catholic leaders were more interested in "the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church and the preservation of its assets." Catholic News Service

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Rep. Zach Wamp's office contacted The Rachel Maddow Show to complain about the C-Street coverage on her program last Friday.

Maddow: Well on Friday's show I quoted an account from the Knoxville News Centinal in which a member of congress who lives at C-Street described one of the most worrying aspects of this shadowy, powerful organization, its secrecy. The Congressman in question is Zach Wamp of Tennessee. He has lived at C-Street for a dozen years and here's what I said about him on Friday.

Zack Wamp of Tennessee is a Republican member of Congress who says he has lived in the C Street house for 12 years. Today, he told “The Knoxville News Sentinel” that the members of Congress who live there are sworn to secrecy.

Quoting from the “News Sentinel,” “The C Street residents have all agreed they won‘t talk about their private living arrangements, Wamp said and he intends to honor that pact. ‘I hate it that John Ensign lives in the house and this happened because it opens up all of these kinds of questions,‘ Wamp said. But, he said, ‘I'm not going to be the guy who goes out and talks.‘”

Maddow went on to say that although Wamp's office claimed he was misquoted on her show, but they have not asked the Knoxville News Sentinal to correct their article and until they do, she's standing by her reporting. Good for her.

I don't think Wamp's doing the GOP any favors by complaining and giving Rachal Maddow another reason to keep this C-Street story alive, not that Ensign and Sanford aren't doing a good enough job without his help.

Why is it that, on the issues that count (Iraq, torture, FISA, secrecy), this administration is so much like the previous one? It really makes me wonder:

The Obama administration objected yesterday to the release of certain Bush-era documents that detail the videotaped interrogations of CIA detainees at secret prisons, arguing to a federal judge that doing so would endanger national security and benefit al-Qaeda's recruitment efforts.

In an affidavit, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta defended the classification of records describing the contents of the 92 videotapes, their destruction by the CIA in 2005 and what he called "sensitive operational information" about the interrogations.

The forced disclosure of such material to the American Civil Liberties Union "could be expected to result in exceptionally grave damage to the national security by informing our enemies of what we knew about them, and when, and in some instances, how we obtained the intelligence we possessed," Panetta argued.

Although Panetta's statement is in keeping with his previous opposition to the disclosure of other information about the CIA's interrogation policies and practices during George W. Bush's presidency, it represents a new assertion by the Obama administration that the CIA should be allowed to keep such information secret. Bush's critics have long hoped that disclosure would pinpoint responsibility for actions they contend were abusive or illegal.

Last month, President Obama said he would seek to bar the release of photographs being sought by other nonprofit groups that depict abusive interrogations at military prisons during the Bush administration.

Panetta argued that none of the 65 CIA documents immediately at issue, which the ACLU has sought for several years in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, should be released. He asked U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein to draw a legal distinction between the administration's release in April of Justice Department memos authorizing the harsh interrogations and the CIA's desire to keep classified its own documents detailing the specific handling of detainees at its secret facilities overseas.

He said that while the Justice Department memos discussed harsh interrogation "in the abstract," the CIA information was "of a qualitatively different nature" because it described the interrogation techniques "as applied in actual operations."

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May 20, 2009 CNN's American Morning.

CHETRY: Well, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi still under fire this morning for her words that the CIA misled her about enhanced interrogation tactics. Many responded with surprise and some outrage at the claim, but should we really expect America's chief spy agency, known for its covert operations and layers of secrecy, to tell Congress everything?

Our next guest says not necessarily. Joining me now from Washington is Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson. He was the chief of staff for former secretary of state Colin Powell. Thanks for being with us this morning. Good to see you.

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FORMER CHIEF OF STAFF FOR COLIN POWELL: Thank you for having me.

CHETRY: So, let's listen again to what Speaker Pelosi said about the information that the CIA provided her and other members of Congress.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REP. NANCY PELOSI (D-CA), HOUSE SPEAKER: I am saying that they are misleading, that the CIA was misleading the Congress.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CHETRY: So, you say it's a common practice for the CIA not to tell Congress everything they're doing. It might not be policy, but you say it happens all the time. Give us some example.

WILKERSON: Well, it does happen, and let me say right off the bat -- let me just say something about my bona fides, as opposed to Michael Gerson's, for example, writing on the op ed page of "The Washington Post" this morning. "The Post" continues to stun me with what they allow to appear on their op ed pages, lambasting the Democrats and others who might as he calls it "attack the CIA." Well, Michael Gerson has no bona fidas. I got 35 years of bona fidas. I have used tactical operational, strategic and intelligence from the agency for 35 years in Vietnam all the way forward to Iraq.

I've studied this as an academic. I know about its origins in the OSS during World War II. I know about its installation in the 1947 National Security Act, and I know the crimes and ravages that have been perpetrated in the name of the American people, the blood and treasure that's being expended by the CIA over that half century. Plus, I also know the successes that it's achieved. So, it's a mixed bag.

But to answer your question directly, the CIA does not have the leadership, not the good people in the ranks of the CIA, but the leadership of the CIA does not have a stellar record about telling the full and unequivocal truth about its covert operations.

Continue reading »

Marcy at FDL brings us this interesting tidbit that indicates you might be serving jail time for downloading music:

Last September, the Bush administration defended the unusual secrecy over an anti-counterfeiting treaty being negotiated by the U.S. government, which some liberal groups worry could criminalize some peer-to-peer file sharing that infringes copyrights.

[...] Now President Obama's White House has tightened the cloak of government secrecy still further, saying in a letter this week that a discussion draft of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and related materials are "classified in the interest of national security pursuant to Executive Order 12958."

[...] Jamie Love, director of the nonprofit group Knowledge Ecology International, filed the Freedom of Information Act request that resulted in this week's denial from the White House. The denial letter (PDF) was sent to Love on Tuesday by Carmen Suro-Bredie, chief FOIA officer in the White House's Office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

[...] Love had written in his original request on January 31--submitted soon after Obama's inauguration--that the documents "are being widely circulated to corporate lobbyists in Europe, Japan, and the U.S. There is no reason for them to be secret from the American public."

[...] Love's group believes that the U.S. and Japan want the treaty to say that willful trademark and copyright infringement on a commercial scale must be subject to criminal sanctions, including infringement that has "no direct or indirect motivation of financial gain."

Thank you, Glenn Greenwald, for taking Marc Ambinder out to the woodshed in respect of his shameless stenography, and granting of anonymity, on the Obama administration's weak excuses as they try to justify perpetuating their continuance of Bush's blanket state secret defense.

As Glenn, a lawyer, points out to ( self-confessed Halperin-wannabe) Ambinder:

If, as Obama's Atlantic spokesman claims ... the Obama DOJ needed more time to review what they wanted to do -- then the solution is easy and obvious: you ask the court for more time. You don't march into court and explicitly advocate a Bush weapon that you've spent the last several years excoriating as a dangerous abuse of power.

...the alternative to Bush's lawsuit-killing use of the privilege is not to waive the privilege entirely. Everyone -- including the ACLU -- acknowledges that the Government should have the right to assert the State Secrets privilege on a document-by-document basis. The controversy was and is only about one thing: the use of the privilege to compel the dismissal of entire lawsuits in advance -- in other words, to convert the State Secrets privilege from what it always was (a focused evidentiary privilege) to what it was never intended to be (full-scale immunity for government lawbreakers from all judicial accountability).

...Obama has banned rendition to countries (such as Egypt and Jordan) where torture is likely. If there are still specific rendition agreements that the Obama DOJ thinks are secret and need to be protected, then they can and should assert the privilege as to those documents. That has nothing to do with demanding that the entire lawsuit be dismissed in advance.

As Wizner told me this morning, there is no reason why the ACLU would even need those supposedly secret documents to make their case. Whether the U.S. has rendition agreements with Jordan or Morocco, or what the content of those agreements are, is irrelevant. Besides, other countries -- such as Sweden, which already investigated these claims and fully disclosed their involvement in the CIA's rendition program when awarding the victims compensation -- have already made certain that many of these facts are disclosed.

Them's the facts, unspinnable.

But unfortunately Ambinder is only one among several who seem to be vying to become the next generation of stenographers with access, and thus secure their places among the journalistic elite alongside Thomas Ricks, David Sanger, George Will and Mark Halperin. They know from those previous alumni's examples that the only way to get seriously good insider access is to faithfully copy down and report the news in exactly the way unofficially officials ask them to - no attribution required. They've been called "lapdogs" of democracy rather than the watchdogs they should be, and they are a bipartisan breed.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

Graphic via Caribdude at The Agonist.

As I wrote over the weekend, progressives who really hoped the Obama administration would roll back the Bush years' secrecy over illegal renditions and torture were waiting with intense interest to see what would happen in a key court case today. Five men were suing Boeing subsidiary, Jeppesen Dataplan, accusing the flight-planning company of aiding the CIA in flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured.

One of those men is Binyam Mohamed, who was illegally kidnapped and had his penis sliced to bits because he read a spoof online about how to make an H-bomb and who is now still held at Gitmo, where he is on hunger-strike, even though he is no longer accused of any crime. He made headlines at the end of last week because two British judges accused the Bush and Obama administrations of threatening the British government to keep evidence of torture supressed. Two other plaintiffs are in jail in Egypt and Morocco, both countries known to practise torture, after being sent there by the US and the other two are free after being held for years.

Last year, the case went nowhere because the Bush administration invoked a special defense of state secrets, as it always did to prevent any cases brought by victims of illegal rendition and torture from even getting to word one. But the ACLU had filed an appeal which was held today.

The Obama administration announced that it would keep the same position as the Bush Administration:

A source inside of the Ninth U.S. District Court tells ABC News that a representative of the Justice Department stood up to say that its position hasn't changed, that new administration stands behind arguments that previous administration made, with no ambiguity at all. The DOJ lawyer said the entire subject matter remains a state secret.

...Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU said of the decision: “Eric Holder’s Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is definitely more of the same. Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama’s Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue. If this is a harbinger of things to come, it will be a long and arduous road to give us back an America we can be proud of again.”

Ben Wizner, a staff attorney with the ACLU, who argued the case for the plaintiffs said, “We are shocked and deeply disappointed that the Justice Department has chosen to continue the Bush administration’s practice of dodging judicial scrutiny of extraordinary rendition and torture. This was an opportunity for the new administration to act on its condemnation of torture and rendition, but instead it has chosen to stay the course. Now we must hope that the court will assert its independence by rejecting the government’s false claims of state secrets and allowing the victims of torture and rendition their day in court.”

A spokesman for Holden says the AG is going to conduct a "review" of state secrets defense to ensure that "the privilege is being invoked only in legally appropriate situations". How much of a review is needed to decide that invoking state secrets to bury Binyam Mohamed's attempts to seek justice is "appropriate" ferchrissake?

Many progressives are going to be upset by this. Glen Greenwald, for example, writes that "Obama fails his first test on civil liberties and accountability -- resoundingly and disgracefully". Based on his conversation after the case with the ACLU's Ben Wizner, Glenn continues:

This was an active, conscious decision made by the Obama DOJ to retain the same abusive, expansive view of "state secrets" as Bush adopted, and to do so for exactly the same purpose: to prevent there from being any judicial accountability of any kind.

You can forget the notion that those who ordered torture and those who wrote legal opinions for them will ever see the inside of a US court on those charges. If Holden is continuing to invoke state secrets in cases such as today, no prosecution of Bush administration criminals will ever get to the satge of even hearing evidence. Thus, the Obama administration collectively become accessories to the Bush administration's crimes. In my opinion, any cabinet member who had an ounce of spine and an ounce of belief in the rule of law for all would resign over this travesty of justice. Watch for an utter lack of that.

Crossposted from Newshoggers

  Which means, of course, that he is destroying them as we speak.

AP via HuffPo:

A federal judge on Saturday ordered Dick Cheney to preserve a wide range of the records from his time as vice president.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly is a setback for the Bush administration in its effort to promote a narrow definition of materials that must be safeguarded under by the Presidential Records Act.

The Bush administration's legal position "heightens the court's concern" that some records may not be preserved, said the judge.

If there's one thing Dick Cheney has learned in the past eight years, it's that there are no consequences for refusing to comply with lawful demands. Expect these records to go the way of those millions of "missing" emails.

UPDATE:  Judge orders Cheney to share discovery with CREW