Now the Obama Justice Department appears to be taking active steps to shield from public view its rationale for this decision not to prosecute. These steps may also prevent us from learning all there is to know about what actually happened.

The steps in question concern a legal battle that is underway between the Justice Department and the New York Times. The Times’ Charlie Savage reports today that Justice is urging a court to reject the paper’s demand, under the Freedom Of Information Act, for the release of thousands of pages of internal government documents that summarize and explain the administration’s decision not to prosecute.

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The documents sought by the Times include interviews that Justice conducted with approximately 100 witnesses in the course of its earlier investigation into CIA torture. That investigation initially began as a probe that was launched at the end of the Bush years and was limited in scope, but was broadened by Obama’s Attorney General Eric Holder in 2009 to encompass the treatment of detainees abroad. This broader probe resulted in the decision not to bring any criminal charges, and in the sought-after documents, the prosecutor who oversaw the investigation, John Durham, explains that decision.

All of these materials are of new relevance in the wake of the Senate Intelligence Committee report. For one thing, the Obama administration has suggested the new revelations will not alter its earlier decision not to prosecute; Obama himself said that he doesn’t want to “re-fight old arguments.” Access to the rationale for that earlier decision would help us evaluate the validity of the administration’s current stance.

For another, those materials could help us navigate the current dispute over the report’s findings that is underway between Senate Intel Committee Dems and the CIA. The CIA and Republicans have faulted Dem staff for failing to conduct interviews of the figures involved, in part because the Justice Department’s probe was ongoing, a lapse Republicans claim led to “significant analytical and factual errors.” If the Justice Department were to release some of these interviews, we could better evaluate the GOP claim that the Dem staff’s failure to conduct similar interviews really would have undercut the report’s core findings.

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The Justice Department argues that it is legally protected from releasing these materials, because FOIA law doesn’t apply to this sort of internal debate leading up to a decision whether to prosecute. Justice also says that compelling the release of them could have a chilling effect on future prosecutions, because the specter of such disclosure could dissuade prosecutors from offering a fully candid internal assessment of the prospects for success in ongoing prosecutions.

But, even if you accept the Justice Department’s arguments, none of them constitute an argument against voluntarily releasing some these materials — in redacted form — which, for the aforementioned reasons, would be very much in the public interest. Even if you don’t think prosecutions are warranted, you should still want this information, for the purposes of getting a full historical accounting and for evaluating the CIA’s push-back.

“Even if they can’t be compelled by law to disclose, they are still free to do so voluntarily, and a partial or voluntary disclosure should be considered in light of the intense public interest in this case,” Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy specialist at the Federation of American Scientists, tells me. “If the concern is that compulsory disclosure will have a chilling effect on future investigations, that concern would be mooted if the release were voluntary.”

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Whatever the Justice Department’s rationale for not releasing some of these documents — in redacted form, or however else — the effect of it is to shield from public view the administration’s detailed rationale for not pursing criminal prosecutions of torturers.

“The Senate report has left people wondering, What are we going to do about this? The Justice Department has also answered that question and decided that the answer is, Nothing,” Aftergood says. “The basis for that decision is now a matter of intense public interest. Yet they’re refusing to divulge it. That’s very disappointing. This is a matter of historical importance that implicates not just the CIA but the country as a whole.”