A little over a month has passed since U.S. president Barack Obama ordered the closure of Guantanamo Bay and other CIA detention centers. Now, new information has surfaced about the extent of the 2005 destruction of interrogation tapes by the CIA. The number of tapes destroyed by the CIA was previously unknown, but the news broke early last week that 92 was the total.
The number comes as a disappointment to many, but a shock to few. The CIA has long been known for the torture tactics it employs during interrogation sessions. The injustices, not surprisingly, only increased during Bush’s post-911 terror interrogations. Consequently, when the investigation against the CIA began in 2005, it came as no surprise that the audio and visual evidence that documented the interrogation sessions was systematically destroyed in an attempt to protect the CIA officials that engaged in these sessions. Now that the amount of evidence destroyed has been revealed, American Civil Liberties Union attorney Amrit Singh has stated that the CIA should be held in contempt for failing to reveal the information at an earlier date.
That this revelation arose in conjunction with the instructions to close down Guantanamo Bay leaves me wondering if this string of events signals a long-overdue reign-in of the CIA, and the dawn of a new era under President Obama. The disclosure of the destruction statistic was made by CIA officials during legal proceedings, but it was the Obama government that released to the public the information from the trials (along with the Justice Department memos from Bush’s presidency). Could this mean greater transparency in the future? All that Obama has done since his inauguration points to a move in the right direction. Still, these are only the first steps, and it will take more work to correct past injustices and ensure better practices in the future.
The optimism in response to the information release was tempered by the grim realization of belated atonement for the Bush administration. A further and even more troubling realization is that the government has probably only scratched the surface of revealing, and moving to correct, past wrongdoings. Given that the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel gave Bush the authority to suspend freedom of speech, ignore the Fourth Amendment, and send prisoners to countries known to use torture, what is left to discover isn’t likely to make the free world proud. Nevertheless, it’s better to be disappointed with eyes wide open than to be blissfully ignorant of the truth.
