Once again, our government is trying to exempt themselves from the rule of law in the name of secrecy. It’s the same as saying that official crimes committed in secret cannot be prosecuted.

Via Glenn Greenwald, the Obama administration and its allies in Congress are trying to carve out an ex post facto exemption from the Freedom of Information Act in order to hide photographic evidence of U.S war crimes.

President Obama has repeatedly vowed to make his administration the most open and transparent in history. But now he is demanding unprecedented secrecy powers. Last week, the U.S. Senate quietly passed a new bill called The Detainee Photographic Records Protection Act of 2009. Its sole purpose is to suppress the evidence of war crimes committed against “individuals engaged, captured, or detained after September 11, 2001, by the Armed Forces of the United States in operations outside of the United States.”

Greenwald puts this new exemption from the rule of law in context:

What makes all of this even worse is that it is part of a broader trend whereby the Government simply retroactively changes the law whenever it decides it does not want to abide by it. For decades, we had laws in place authorizing citizens to sue their telecommunication carriers if the telecoms allowed government spying on their communications in violation of the law, but when it was revealed that the telecoms did exactly this, the Congress simply changed the law retroactively so that it no longer applied. For decades, we had laws imposing civil and criminal liability on government officials who engaged in or authorized torture, but when it was revealed that our government did that, the Congress just retroactively changed the law to protect the torturers. And now that courts have ruled that our decades-old transparency law compels disclosure of this torture evidence, the Congress is just going to retroactively change the law — again — this time to empower the President to suppress that evidence anyway.

UPDATE: U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has granted a government request to extend the deadline from June 9 to July 9 for filing an appeal against an order to release photographs of detainee abuse.

UPDATE: General Ricardo Sanchez, the former commander of coalition forces in Iraq, called for a truth commission to investigate the abuses and torture which occurred there. The General went on to say that, “during my time in Iraq there was not one instance of actionable intelligence that came out of these interrogation techniques.”

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