But despite the significant value that some of Burr's fellow overseers insist that they gleaned from The Panetta Review, Burr wants to return the Senate committee's copy of the document back to the CIA. "The Panetta Review was never intended for the committee to have,” Burr told the Huffington Post. “At some point, we will probably send it back to where it came from.” On its face, the explanation makes no sense. Why would Burr speak as if the intentions of the CIA are dispositive? His job is to oversee the spy agency, not to respect its desire for privacy. What could be more antithetical to the proper posture of an overseer? (As if a bureaucracy would intentionally turn over evidence of its own abuses.)

The Senate intelligence committee ought to thirst for every drop of information it can get as it polices a secretive spy agency with a long history of hiding illegal acts. No overseer can credibly deny the value of a report showing how overseers were misled.

So what is Burr up to? The apparent explanation is that he's selling out his colleagues to protect the CIA from having to release The Panetta Review to the public. In Freedom of Information Act litigation initiated by investigative journalist Jason Leopold, it would be useful to the CIA to persuade a judge that The Panetta Review constitutes an internal CIA deliberation rather than an agency record. Burr's comments on The Panetta Review seem calculated to bolster that case.

What's more, Senator Burr is taking a similar stance consistent with that motivation: He is also intent on keeping the full Senate report on torture from the public.

In bygone years, Burr sided with the CIA and against a majority of his Senate colleagues in their effort to create a definitive report on torture during the Bush years. Now, again an effective lackey for the bureaucracy he's ostensibly overseeing, "Burr sent a letter... to the White House saying that his Democratic predecessor, Senator Dianne Feinstein, should never have transmitted the entire 6,700-page report to numerous departments and agencies within the executive branch—and requested that all copies of the report be 'returned immediately,'" the New York Times reports. The newspaper makes an informed guess about his motives:

Mr. Burr’s unusual letter to Mr. Obama might have been written with an eye toward future Freedom of Information Act lawsuits. Congress is not subject to such requests, and any success he has in getting the Obama administration to return all copies of the Senate report to the Intelligence Committee could hinder attempts to someday have the report declassified and released publicly.

Leopold, a FOIA expert, concurs. "By advising the White House to cease entering the full torture report into an executive branch system of records," he explains, "Burr is saying that the document is a 'congressional record,' which is exempt from FOIA, as opposed to an 'agency record,' which is subject to the provisions of the law."