Chuck Schumer: “I join my colleague and ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, the Senator from Vermont, as well as my colleague…”

“I join my colleague and ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, the Senator from Vermont, as well as my colleague, the Senator from Massachusetts, in expressing support for the amendment we will vote upon either tonight or tomorrow, and to express my displeasure that the documents that we have received are so inadequate in terms of what we have requested. The first point I will make is, don't let anybody think that because this is a thick pile, it really has the nub of the matter. It does not. The bottom line is that I would say that an ounce of disclosure is going to buy this White House a pound of problems. These documents raise more questions than they answer. The White House is better off coming clean and releasing all relevant and nonclassified documents. In the Judiciary Committee, we have asked the administration for 23 specific documents as a starting point. Of the 13 the White House released today, only 3 are among those we asked for; 3 out of 23 is not a very good average. It is not even a good batting average, and we are pretty lenient there when we are above a third. It seems painfully clear that this administration devised a strained--some would say tortured--new definition of torture. Then someone in the administration authorized the use of new ``interrogation techniques'' that would have run afoul of the old definition of torture but under the new definition were permissible.”