5 ms·

Archivist Won’t Call “Torture Report” a Permanent Record

82 points by rl3 11y ago

anfedorov 11y ago
Cached link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ith6HIWTzgEJ:fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2016/05/archivist-record/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ith6HIW... The ending is the clearest part: Although the Archivist has independent legal authority to determine the status of federal records under the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014, he remains an executive branch official and he is not politically autonomous. In the face of FOIA litigation, which takes precedence as a practical matter, it actually is “routine” (or at least unsurprising) for the Archivist to defer to the Justice Department and to abstain from unilateral action. If the ongoing FOIA litigation ultimately led to a determination that the Senate report is a “record” for purposes of FOIA, then it would be easy for the Archivist to concur. If not, then it would be more difficult, but not altogether impossible, for the Archivist to conclude that the report is nevertheless a federal record. “The determination of record status under the FRA and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), while not identical, is similar,” the Archivist wrote. In any event, while an immediate resolution of this dispute is foreclosed by the Archivist’s refusal to intervene, the larger question of the status of the Senate report as a federal record remains open. Legal technicalities aside, it would be astonishing if the full Senate Committee report were not preserved for posterity one way or another, and eventually published. Even if it is not the last word on post-9/11 detention and interrogation, and even if not every word of it turns out to be true and correct, the Committee report has already become central to public discourse on the subject. If it became possible to erase it from the historical record in some kind of Stalinesque act of suppression, then we would all have bigger problems to worry about.
- throwaway_xx9 11y ago
  > we would all have bigger problems to worry about. What, like NSLs and defunding congressional watchdog committees? Oh wait ...
  - voodootrucker 11y ago
    Reference please!
    - alexqgb 11y ago
      If you're honestly interested, start with Google.
    - alexqgb 11y ago
      http://lmgtfy.com/ http://lmgtfy.com/
  - dfc 11y ago
    How does the executive branch defund a congressional watchdog committee?
    - drjesusphd 11y ago
      Guess.
      - dfc 11y ago
        Congress has the power of the purse, not the executive. So I have no guess. Can you please elaborate if it is so obvious?
- StanislavPetrov 11y ago
  >If it became possible to erase it from the historical record in some kind of Stalinesque act of suppression, then we would all have bigger problems to worry about. There's no "if" about it. The time for worrying about those bigger problems has already passed. We are in for some very troubling times.
vaadu 11y ago
The "report" was nothing more than a partisan hit-piece by democrats against the Bush administration. The Senate Intelligence Committee took the unprecedented step of proceeding without Republicans even though previous investigations have always been bipartisan. It cherry-picked from millions of CIA documents and refused to interview any witnesses. CIA directors from both parties, including George Tenet (who served under Presidents Clinton and Bush) and John Brennan (who serves under President Obama), have rejected many of the report’s factual findings and its central claim that the CIA systematically misled the White House and the president and covered up the abuse of terrorists.
- x5n1 11y ago
  > abuse of terrorists Many of those people who were abused were not terrorists. Partisan meaning that the opposition took shots at the incumbents as they should. Not the two parties conspired together to paint a rosy picture of the situation, as they do in China. The victors are not writing history. That's the problem.
- jbapple 11y ago
  This comment by vaadu is copy-and-paste from an op-ed in the LA Times by John Yoo, one of the authors of the torture memos: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-yoo-torture-feinstein-20141214-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-yoo-torture-feins... Furthermore, whether the torture report was done properly seems irrelevant to whether it is "a federal record and must be preserved."
  - jbapple 11y ago
    Oh, and the original op-ed by John Yoo? It came out a 18 months ago, less than a week after the torture report came out. It wasn't about federal records preservation.
ck2 11y ago
This is obviously pure politics on both sides of the issue since it is just a document and the whole thing is absurd. In the era of the internet and "the cloud", the report is going to be available to everyone forever (if it was ever available in the first place). However just like the lack of prosecution of bankers for the financial crisis, there is also no responsibility for torture on any level by this administration and likely the next. Everyone from John Yoo to the people who actually did the hands-on are doing just fine and very well physically and financially. And if Feinstein had not been pissed off by the CIA so much, she probably wouldn't even have a problem sweeping all this under-the-rug. She is quite the hawk and pretty much a Democrat in name only.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > In the era of the internet and "the cloud", the report is going to be available to everyone forever (if it was ever available in the first place). Not forever. Only as long as there's enough people caring about it. Even if it won't disappear over the next years as companies shut down their cloud services and people don't move all their data to new ones, it can and will effectively disappear when people lose "references" pointing to it. To find something on-line, you need an engine that indexes it, but more importantly, you need to be aware what to look for in the first place (and have a reason to). Link rot is a real thing too. The cloud is one of the most fragile and short-term way of storing information humanity has ever invented.

82 points by rl3 11y ago

Cached link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ith6HIWTzgEJ:fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2016/05/archivist-record/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ith6HIW... The ending is the clearest part: Although the Archivist has independent legal authority to determine the status of federal records under the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments of 2014, he remains an executive branch official and he is not politically autonomous. In the face of FOIA litigation, which takes precedence as a practical matter, it actually is “routine” (or at least unsurprising) for the Archivist to defer to the Justice Department and to abstain from unilateral action. If the ongoing FOIA litigation ultimately led to a determination that the Senate report is a “record” for purposes of FOIA, then it would be easy for the Archivist to concur. If not, then it would be more difficult, but not altogether impossible, for the Archivist to conclude that the report is nevertheless a federal record. “The determination of record status under the FRA and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), while not identical, is similar,” the Archivist wrote. In any event, while an immediate resolution of this dispute is foreclosed by the Archivist’s refusal to intervene, the larger question of the status of the Senate report as a federal record remains open. Legal technicalities aside, it would be astonishing if the full Senate Committee report were not preserved for posterity one way or another, and eventually published. Even if it is not the last word on post-9/11 detention and interrogation, and even if not every word of it turns out to be true and correct, the Committee report has already become central to public discourse on the subject. If it became possible to erase it from the historical record in some kind of Stalinesque act of suppression, then we would all have bigger problems to worry about.

throwaway_xx9 11y ago
> we would all have bigger problems to worry about. What, like NSLs and defunding congressional watchdog committees? Oh wait ...
- voodootrucker 11y ago
  Reference please!
  - alexqgb 11y ago
    If you're honestly interested, start with Google.
  - alexqgb 11y ago
    http://lmgtfy.com/ http://lmgtfy.com/
- dfc 11y ago
  How does the executive branch defund a congressional watchdog committee?
  - drjesusphd 11y ago
    Guess.
    - dfc 11y ago
      Congress has the power of the purse, not the executive. So I have no guess. Can you please elaborate if it is so obvious?
StanislavPetrov 11y ago
>If it became possible to erase it from the historical record in some kind of Stalinesque act of suppression, then we would all have bigger problems to worry about. There's no "if" about it. The time for worrying about those bigger problems has already passed. We are in for some very troubling times.

vaadu 11y ago

The "report" was nothing more than a partisan hit-piece by democrats against the Bush administration. The Senate Intelligence Committee took the unprecedented step of proceeding without Republicans even though previous investigations have always been bipartisan. It cherry-picked from millions of CIA documents and refused to interview any witnesses. CIA directors from both parties, including George Tenet (who served under Presidents Clinton and Bush) and John Brennan (who serves under President Obama), have rejected many of the report’s factual findings and its central claim that the CIA systematically misled the White House and the president and covered up the abuse of terrorists.

x5n1 11y ago
> abuse of terrorists Many of those people who were abused were not terrorists. Partisan meaning that the opposition took shots at the incumbents as they should. Not the two parties conspired together to paint a rosy picture of the situation, as they do in China. The victors are not writing history. That's the problem.
jbapple 11y ago
This comment by vaadu is copy-and-paste from an op-ed in the LA Times by John Yoo, one of the authors of the torture memos: http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-yoo-torture-feinstein-20141214-story.html http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-yoo-torture-feins... Furthermore, whether the torture report was done properly seems irrelevant to whether it is "a federal record and must be preserved."
- jbapple 11y ago
  Oh, and the original op-ed by John Yoo? It came out a 18 months ago, less than a week after the torture report came out. It wasn't about federal records preservation.

ck2 11y ago

This is obviously pure politics on both sides of the issue since it is just a document and the whole thing is absurd. In the era of the internet and "the cloud", the report is going to be available to everyone forever (if it was ever available in the first place). However just like the lack of prosecution of bankers for the financial crisis, there is also no responsibility for torture on any level by this administration and likely the next. Everyone from John Yoo to the people who actually did the hands-on are doing just fine and very well physically and financially. And if Feinstein had not been pissed off by the CIA so much, she probably wouldn't even have a problem sweeping all this under-the-rug. She is quite the hawk and pretty much a Democrat in name only.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> In the era of the internet and "the cloud", the report is going to be available to everyone forever (if it was ever available in the first place). Not forever. Only as long as there's enough people caring about it. Even if it won't disappear over the next years as companies shut down their cloud services and people don't move all their data to new ones, it can and will effectively disappear when people lose "references" pointing to it. To find something on-line, you need an engine that indexes it, but more importantly, you need to be aware what to look for in the first place (and have a reason to). Link rot is a real thing too. The cloud is one of the most fragile and short-term way of storing information humanity has ever invented.