On his second day in office, President Obama repudiated George W. Bush’s obsessive and destructive secrecy by ordering his government to obey the Freedom of Information Act. He said it should not withhold documents because they are embarrassing, or reveal failures and errors, or “because of speculative or abstract fears.”

He was right.

And yet last week, the Justice Department was in federal court, asking for another delay in releasing three legal opinions written by Steven Bradbury when he was acting head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The memos provided a legal pretext for interrogations that ranged from merely illegal to outright torture.

Scott Shane reported in The Times that the Central Intelligence Agency, hoping to avoid embarrassment, was fighting the release. That is exactly the sort of obstructionism that Mr. Obama ordered stopped.

The administration, which now has until April 16 to decide about the Bradbury memos, has agreed “to review” for release yet another memo that has been kept secret far too long. Written by Jay Bybee, a former Justice Department lawyer who is now a federal judge, it redefined torture in a way that almost anything, short of murder, would be legal.