Executive Branch

URL: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/executive.html

The Senate's 6,700 page, $40M report on the CIA's participation in torture has apparently never been read by a single member of the Executive Branch of the US Government, because the Department of Justice has ordered them all to stay away from it. Why does the Department of Justice want to keep the Executive from finding out about the CIA's use of torture? Because Senate documents are not subject to the freedom of information requests, but Executive documents are, and the Department of Justice is so deathly afraid of the public discovering official wrongdoing that they have banned anyone from touching the document, so therefore it becomes a subject to clear rules.

I believe that appropriate Department of Justice and FBI officials must read the full 6,700-page Senate Intelligence Committee Study of the CIA's Detention and interrogation program in order to understand what happens and to hopefully draw appropriate lessons. This is exactly what Director Comey promised when he said he would choose FBI officials to read the full, final version of the Committee's Study and consider the lessons that can be learned from it. Director Comey also acknowledged that former FBI Director order FBI agents not to participate in the CIA program. Unfortunately as the executive summary of the study makes clear, the Department of Justice was among those parts of the Executive Branch that were misled about the program, and DOJ officials' understanding of this history is very important to its institutional role going forward.

This is important to what we are learning in class because it teaches me what the executive branches role and how important they are to us.