
Archivist Won’t Call “Torture Report” a Permanent Record - rl3
https://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2016/05/archivist-record/
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anfedorov
Cached link:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ith6HIW...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Ith6HIWTzgEJ:fas.org/blogs/secrecy/2016/05/archivist-
record/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

The ending is the clearest part:

Although the Archivist has independent legal authority to determine the status
of federal records under the Presidential and Federal Records Act Amendments
of 2014, he remains an executive branch official and he is not politically
autonomous. In the face of FOIA litigation, which takes precedence as a
practical matter, it actually is “routine” (or at least unsurprising) for the
Archivist to defer to the Justice Department and to abstain from unilateral
action.

If the ongoing FOIA litigation ultimately led to a determination that the
Senate report is a “record” for purposes of FOIA, then it would be easy for
the Archivist to concur. If not, then it would be more difficult, but not
altogether impossible, for the Archivist to conclude that the report is
nevertheless a federal record. “The determination of record status under the
FRA and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), while not identical, is
similar,” the Archivist wrote.

In any event, while an immediate resolution of this dispute is foreclosed by
the Archivist’s refusal to intervene, the larger question of the status of the
Senate report as a federal record remains open.

Legal technicalities aside, it would be astonishing if the full Senate
Committee report were not preserved for posterity one way or another, and
eventually published. Even if it is not the last word on post-9/11 detention
and interrogation, and even if not every word of it turns out to be true and
correct, the Committee report has already become central to public discourse
on the subject. If it became possible to erase it from the historical record
in some kind of Stalinesque act of suppression, then we would all have bigger
problems to worry about.

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throwaway_xx9
> we would all have bigger problems to worry about.

What, like NSLs and defunding congressional watchdog committees?

Oh wait ...

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voodootrucker
Reference please!

~~~
alexqgb
If you're honestly interested, start with Google.

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ck2
This is obviously pure politics on both sides of the issue since it is just a
document and the whole thing is absurd.

In the era of the internet and "the cloud", the report is going to be
available to everyone forever (if it was ever available in the first place).

However just like the lack of prosecution of bankers for the financial crisis,
there is also no responsibility for torture on any level by this
administration and likely the next.

Everyone from John Yoo to the people who actually did the hands-on are doing
just fine and very well physically and financially.

And if Feinstein had not been pissed off by the CIA so much, she probably
wouldn't even have a problem sweeping all this under-the-rug. She is quite the
hawk and pretty much a Democrat in name only.

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TeMPOraL
> _In the era of the internet and "the cloud", the report is going to be
> available to everyone forever (if it was ever available in the first
> place)._

Not forever. Only as long as there's enough people caring about it. Even if it
won't disappear over the next years as companies shut down their cloud
services and people don't move _all_ their data to new ones, it can and will
effectively disappear when people lose "references" pointing to it. To find
something on-line, you need an engine that indexes it, but more importantly,
you need to be aware what to look for in the first place (and have a reason
to). Link rot is a real thing too.

The cloud is one of the most fragile and short-term way of storing information
humanity has ever invented.

