Once again, the Obama administration has chosen to hew closely to the Bush administration’s line on a controversial aspect of The War Against Terror. This time it’s about supporting the CIA as it invokes national security as a reason for drawing an invisibility cloak around the CIA’s “defunct detention and interrogation program”.

The Central Intelligence Agency is refusing to make public hundreds of pages of internal documents about the agency’s defunct detention and interrogation program, saying such disclosures would jeopardize national security by revealing classified intelligence sources and operations.

The C.I.A.’s argument to withhold the material, laid out Monday in a declaration to a federal court in New York, comes a week after the Obama administration declassified documents about abuses in the C.I.A.’s secret overseas prisons and the Justice Department began investigating the actions of C.I.A. operatives.

Among the documents the agency is trying to keep classified are President George W. Bush’s September 2001 authorization for the C.I.A. to begin secretly holding terrorism suspects; cables between C.I.A. officers in the secret prisons, known as black sites, and their bosses in Washington; and assessments by C.I.A. lawyers about the legality of the detention program.

The New York Times article, for some reason, chooses to focus on interrogation procedures (as opposed to interrogation techniques), but as the list above makes clear, there’s a lot more than interrogation procedures that is being kept secret. The ACLU looks at the Obama administration’s action, and doesn’t exactly find evidence of change it can believe in:

Lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union, which sued the government in 2003 for release of the detention documents, said the C.I.A.’s declaration undercut the Obama administration’s pledges of greater transparency.

“There’s really no distance at all between this declaration and the declarations the C.I.A. was filing during the Bush administration,” said Jameel Jaffer, an A.C.L.U. lawyer.

Mr. Jaffer said the A.C.L.U. would petition the judge in the case, Alvin K. Hellerstein of Federal District Court, to get the documents declassified.