Joe Conason: Bush Hides the Truth About Terror, Torture

Responding to the most serious questions we confront as a nation, the Bush administration can routinely be expected to hide, obfuscate and deceive. If credible information indicates that high-ranking government and military officials permitted and even encouraged the horrific abuse of foreign detainees, the administration assures us that a few bad soldiers can be blamed. If honest statistics indicate that the "war on terror" is achieving less than advertised, the administration buries the report in which those numbers are traditionally published.

Twice within a single week, in a telling coincidence, the administration displayed its dogged commitment to concealment. On April 15, the State Department admitted that it plans to withhold the data on terrorist incidents compiled for the annual, Congressionally mandated report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, which the department must release at the end of the month. And on April 22, the Army celebrated the first anniversary of the exposure of the Abu Ghraib scandal by announcing that an internal investigation had "exonerated" four senior officers responsible for military prisons in Iraq, despite previous findings of culpability.