Eventually some judge will rule the government has to turn over the material and then what?
The second link goes to a New Yorker article July 21, that summarizes Seymour Hersh's essays over the last eight years, tracking down CIA and Pentagon Death Squads for assassinations in Asia, North Africa and the Middle East.
What I really can't figure out is why? Why keep all of the rot of the Bush regime secret? Much of the executive branch is involved and it can't get fixed until all this shit is out in the open.
The first quoted article covers a lot of the illegal domestic surveillence wrong doing. The second quoted article covers a lot of the illegal foreign activities.
``The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is filing a federal lawsuit to force release of documents the intelligence community has refused to turn over in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. US intelligence agencies keep records of internal reports and investigations of alleged wrongdoing, and are obliged to report that wrongdoing to the Intelligence Oversight Board (IOB), but may have failed to do so in recent years.
The IOB is a body made up of private citizens, with top-level security clearances, who are tasked with overseeing the conduct of the intelligence communities, including examining all internal reports of alleged misconduct. The IOB reports to the president, and is meant to be an independent oversight body, providing important information about the activities of the intelligence community that may raise legal or diplomatic concerns.
According to Wired magazine:
The CIA is among the agencies that failed to respond to the EFF's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for copies of the reports. Given the unfolding controversy over the CIA's apparent failure to notify Congress of a secret agency assassination program, the withholding of these documents takes on even greater importance, according to EFF lawyer Nate Cardozo....
...They have also demanded release of documents from the office of the Attorney General, as part of an effort to ascertain whether any misconduct reports were referred to the Dept. of Justice for prosecution and whether any of those prosecution requests were dealt with, ignored or pursued by officials at the Dept. of Justice...''
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Here's the second story:
``By the time "The General's Report" was published, almost six years had gone by since September 11th, and a narrative had emerged in Hersh's pieces-about the Bush Administration's affinity for the assassination option, and its attempts to get around the law and Congress. It did so, in part, by deciding that certain things that looked like intelligence operations were really military ones. But was there a clean line between the Joint Special Operations Command and the C.I.A.? Again, Hersh's reporting suggests that there was not.
There also-and this is important-does not seem to have been one single, discrete program but, instead, a series of executive orders, findings, and operations, across many theatres. Together, they could be said to have amounted to an assassination-friendly-or at least assassination-tolerant-culture within the Bush Administration.''
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/newsdesk/2009/07/close-read-seymour-hersh-assassinations.html