Hiding failure — again

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: Bush administration looks at an issue, finds inconvenient facts, then hides the facts and pretends they don’t exist. Sound familiar? It’s happened again.

U.S. law enforcement agents working at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, concluded that controversial interrogation practices used there by the Defense Department produced intelligence information that was “suspect at best,” an FBI agent told a superior in a memo in May last year.

But the Justice Department, which reviewed the memo for national security secrets before releasing it to a civil liberties group in December, redacted the FBI agent’s conclusion.

The department, acting after the Defense Department expressed its own views on which portions of the letter should be redacted, also blacked out a separate assertion in the memo that military interrogation practices could undermine future military trials for terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay.

It also withheld a statement by the memo’s author that Justice Department criminal division officials were so concerned about the military interrogation practices that they took their complaints to the office of the Pentagon’s chief attorney, William J. Haynes II, whom President Bush has nominated to become a federal appellate judge.

I know we’ve seen these examples too many times, but that doesn’t make it any less breathtaking. We were told the torture was limited to a few “bad apples.” It wasn’t. We were told we were torturing dangerous criminals. We weren’t. We were told the torture was at least producing valuable intelligence. It wasn’t.

But then to take this from merely stunning to truly outrageous, Bush’s Justice Department, on advice from the Pentagon, hid the FBI’s conclusions, under the fraudulent auspices of “national security,” so the public wouldn’t know the truth.

No one in the administration was willing to comment or defend the redactions, but this warrants — indeed, it demands — further explanation. In this case, investigators not only concluded that torture didn’t work, but that it was counter-productive, making it harder to hold future terrorist suspects. Forget morality and decency for a moment and consider this purely on pragmatic grounds: our “aggressive interrogation” techniques were undermining our objectives.

And instead of simply ignoring these revelations, the Bush administration proactively covered up the conclusions.

[Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.)], who had pushed the Justice Department to release a version of the memo that included the new disclosures, yesterday sharply criticized the department’s initial handling of it. “As I suspected, the previously withheld information had nothing to do with protecting intelligence sources and methods, and everything to do with protecting the DOD from embarrassment,” Levin said.

Given the circumstances, would it be unreasonable to ask for some congressional oversight here? How about a few questions about who, exactly, redacted the relevant portions at the DoJ? Who at the Pentagon encouraged the move? Who all was consulted before the information was hidden? Will the responsible parties by held to account for using bogus “national security” arguments to hide the truth?

The mind reels.