Will Any Senator Confront Obama Coverup?
Three senators – Sheldon Whitehouse, Patrick Leahy, and Russ Feingold – confronted the Bush Administration policy of torture today, during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing entitled, What Went Wrong: Torture and the Office of Legal Counsel in the Bush Administration. It was important for them to do so, for the Democrats in Congress failed to do anything substantial to resist the practice of torture while George W. Bush was in office.
Yet, George W. Bush is not in office now. President Barack Obama is. So, hearings that investigate policies supporting illegal torture that took place under Bush should, in order to be relevant to current action, also investigate policies supporting torture that persist under Barack Obama.
If you think that torture policies no longer exist under the Obama Administration, you’re wrong. Just one case in point came up today. At about the same time that the Senate Judiciary Committee was holding its hearing into George W. Bush’s programs to practice torture, President Obama was announcing his decision to keep evidence of that torture secret.
President Obama acknowledged that additional photographs of graphic torture of prisoners held by the United States government exist, but said that, in spite of his previous promises to run an open government, he would do everything in his power to prevent those photographs from becoming public.
Obama’s declaration of a coverup of torture evidence came in spite of the requirements of the Freedom of Information Act. Obama’s excuse for withholding the photographs, requested by a Freedom of Information Act petition, is that the photographs would be politically inconvenient for the U.S. federal government. Obama said the photographs would “further inflame anti-American opinion”. The need to manage political opinions is not a valid rationale for withholding information from Freedom of Information Act requests.
President Barack Obama is openly violating the law in order to cover up torture. Will Democratic senators like Whitehouse, Leahy and Feingold do anything about it, or will they continue to solely focus on the Bush presidency, which is conveniently finished?
The answer to this question is now a clear NO. Yesterday, the Senate UNANIMOUSLY passed amendment 1157 to the military supplemental appropriations bill. That amendment gives the Secretary of Defense the power to conceal from the public, regardless of the Freedom of Information Act, any photographs depicting torture in the past…
… and here’s what’s really scary – it gives this power to censor photographs of future acts of torture as well.
[...] days ago, I asked whether any member of the U.S. Senate would confront President Obama about his actions to conceal photographs of torture by the U.S. military. Today, I can answer the [...]