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G_j

(40,367 posts) Mon Apr 22, 2013, 12:23 PM Apr 2013

Pressure mounting on Obama administration to allow access to documents pertaining to TORTURE

http://thinkprogress.org/security/2013/04/17/1878711/national-security-brief-pressure-obama-torture/?mobile=wp

Pressure is mounting on the Obama administration to allow access to documents pertaining to the CIA’s post 9/11 terror suspect detention program and to order a full accounting of the Bush-era torture program. At the outset of his first term, President Obama said his administration would not be investigating torture because, he said, he wanted to “look forward, not backward.”

A bipartisan 11-member task force convened by the Constitution Project released a report on Tuesday concluding that the Bush administration’s interrogation polices after 9/11 were, in fact, torture, but it also criticized the Obama White House for blocking a formal investigation into the matter. “As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture,” their report says.

“The Obama administration also has failed to be as open and accountable on such fundamental questions of law, morality and principle as a great power that widely supports human rights needs to be,” Task Force member Thomas Pickering wrote in the Washington Post on Tuesday.

An editorial in the New York Times on Wednesday piled on. “The report’s appearance all these years later is a reminder of the lost opportunity for a full accounting in 2009 when President Obama chose not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 detention and interrogation programs,” the Times writes, adding, “dentifying past mistakes so they can be avoided is central to looking forward.”

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