The Obama administration, as evidenced by the court-ordered release of CIA documents on Monday, is breaking campaign promises for increased transparency, ACLU attorney Ben Wizner said Monday night. Instead, he analogized, Obama is merely continuing Bush-era secrecy surrounding the prior administration’s torture program.
Holding up two documents before cameras on the set of MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, Wizner attributed one, almost completely censored in black ink, to the Bush administration. The other, which appeared nearly identical, he attributed to the Obama administration’s disclosures Monday. The only difference between the two, he noted, was a single sentence that had been unredacted.
“You see this little line here?” he asked Maddow. “It makes you want to say, ‘Keep the change,’ right?”
“I think what’s going on here is very, very clear,” Wizner said. “This is information, the release of which would increase calls for criminal accountability. And that is something that the Obama administration has been fighting to avoid.”
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The documents released Monday highlight testimony given by alleged terrorists during their military tribunals.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, allegedly a 9/11 plotter and “arch terrorist,” according to the Bush administration, said he made up stories to appease his interrogators.
”I make up stories,” Mohammed is quoted as saying in his 2007 Gitmo hearing. He also claimed to have taken part in at least 29 terrorist plots.
Mohammed says he told his questioners he didn’t know the location of Osama Bin Laden, and was tortured as a result.
The newly released information, Wizner said, proves that not only was the Bush administration’s torture program illegal and immoral, it was “useless” as well.
This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast June 15, 2009.




