The CIA’s inspector general office admitted to reporters that the department inadvertently deleted its copy of the U.S. Senate’s report detailing the nation’s post-9/11 detention and torture of detainees, Yahoo News reported Monday.

The department also deleted a hard disk backup of the report.

“Clearly the CIA would rather we all forgot about torture,” Cori Creider, a director at human rights watchdog Reprieve, responded to the news in a statement.

The admission comes only days after a federal court ruled that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) does not apply to the report, blocking its release to the public. Observers noted that the deletion coincides with widespread government efforts to suppress the document.

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Yahoo News described the bizarre circumstances that led to the document’s erasure from the inspector general’s servers:

“It’s stunning that even the CIA’s own watchdog couldn’t manage to hang onto its copy of the Senate’s landmark report about CIA black sites. One worries that no one is minding the store,” Crider commented.

“The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer… sources said,” Yahoo News reported, “But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public.”

The federal judge overseeing the aforementioned case regarding whether FOIA applies to the torture report was not informed that the deletion had occurred.

Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the highest-ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch requesting that the court be informed of the event. “Your prompt response will allay my concerns that this was more than an ‘accident,'” Feinstein added.

A CIA spokesperson refused to speak directly to the inspector general’s destruction of the report, but told Yahoo News that “another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters.”

“If we are not careful, this report will go the way of the waterboarding tapes,” Crider warned. “It’s deeply depressing that the CIA still thinks they can shred and spin their way out of this scandal, but that is the consequence of impunity. Not a single person who designed or implemented the Bush-era torture program has been made to explain or apologize.”

“With the threat of a new Torturer-in-Chief on the horizon,” Crider said, “it is vital that the CIA comes clean and admits that kidnapping and torturing dozens of individuals was an appalling mistake and must not happen again.”

Two federal agencies on Friday quietly finalized two reports, set for release next week, that found offshore fracking in California poses no “significant” risk to the environment—paving the way for oil and gas companies to resume the controversial extraction method in the Santa Barbara Channel and imperiling the region’s wildlife in the process, opponents said.

The announcement Friday from the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (OEM) and the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement puts an end to a court-ordered ban on offshore fracking in federal waters off the coast of California. The moratorium was put into place in January as part of a settlement with the Center for Biological Diversity (CBD), which challenged the Obama administration’s ‘rubber-stamping’ of offshore drilling activity without an environmental review.

Environmental activists warned on Friday that kicking off a new round of drilling in the area puts wildlife at risk from chemical-laden wastewater and said they would be willing to file another lawsuit to keep it from happening.

“The Obama administration is once again putting California’s beautiful coast in the oil industry’s crosshairs,” said Miyoko Sakashita, director of CBD’s Oceans program. “Our beaches and wildlife face a renewed threat from fracking chemicals and oil spills. New legal action may be the only way to get federal officials to do their jobs and protect our ocean from offshore fracking.”

Wenonah Hauter, executive director of the environmental advocacy group Food & Water Watch, criticized President Barack Obama for “doubling down on fracking, instead of providing climate leadership and protecting our communities and our environment.”

Democrats are meeting in Washington, D.C. this week for a potential “tug of war” between establishment and progressive factions of the party.

Ahead of the national convention in July, the Democratic Party’s platform drafting committee gathered Wednesday and Thursday in the nation’s capital for the first in a series of regional hearings “designed to engage every voice in the Party.”

The panel will consider testimony on a number of key issues including raising the minimum wage, so-called “free-trade” deals, foreign policy, and banking reform.

As the committee includes a slew of Bernie Sanders-supporting progressives as well as “influence peddlers” selected by Hillary Clinton and Democratic National Committee (DNC) Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, it remains to be seen if the platform will reflect the revolutionary ideals embodied by the Sanders campaign, or the status quo embraced by the establishment.

Watch a live-stream below:

Common Dreams reported Wednesday on demands that the party’s 2016 platform include a nationwide ban on fracking. Low-wage workers also rallied outside the committee meeting on Wednesday, calling for members to write support for a $15 minimum wage into the platform.

Isaiah Poole of the Campaign for America’s Future reported:

Economic Policy Institute (EPI) president Larry Mishel spoke before the committee on Thursday morning, arguing that to boost Americans’ wages, “policymakers must intentionally tilt bargaining power back toward low- and moderate-wage workers,” as per EPI’s Raising America’s Pay initiative. 

Among the other voices testifying before the drafting committee on Thursday: Nancy Altman of Social Security Works; Lori Wallach of Public Citizen’s Global Trade Watch; Joseph Cirincione of Ploughshares Fund; Sandra Springer, a teacher represented by the American Federation of Teachers; and Michael Smith, a recently laid-off Nabisco worker form BCTGM Local 300.

According to CNN, other “platform fights” to watch in the lead-up to the national convention in July include:

• Citing Clinton’s remarks at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) annual conference in March, CNN says “America’s relationship with Israel is likely to be the nastiest fight in Philadelphia.”
• As CNN notes, “the platform approved at the 2012 convention calls for ‘free and fair trade’—with a focus on spurring exports while maintaining human rights, environmental and other protections. The key question will be whether the party drops the ‘free’ from its platform.”
• “Both candidates support keeping a tight rein on Wall Street,” CNN reports, “but Sanders and his supporters have been much starker in their language. Like many of the battles, this one is not a question of ‘Where does the party go?’ but instead, ‘How far?'”
• “Universal health care was a consolation prize Clinton won from Obama in 2008, with his promise to make it a centerpiece of the 2008 platform and push for it,” CNN explains. “But now Clinton is on the other side of that equation, with Sanders and his supporters pushing for the more expansive health care coverage and Clinton defending the new status quo.”

In its own write-up of the drafting committee meeting, the Huffington Post reports:

Indeed, Zogby himself wrote in a blog post this week:

The next public forum takes place next week in Phoenix, followed by a drafting meeting in St. Louis and the full committee’s adoption of platform planks in Orlando, Fla., just ahead of the July 25-28 nominating convention in Philadelphia. 

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports: “The Orlando session will be the first meeting of the full 187-member committee whose members are selected by state parties from among convention delegates, and full committee meetings can sometimes be contentious.”

And the evolution of the party platform could inform how the primary race itself takes shape. As former NAACP president and Sanders supporter Ben Jealous told the Huffington Post on Wednesday: “[Sanders] should stay in until he gets everything he’s fighting for, or at least as much of it as possible.”

Submit your own written or video testimony by June 18 here; follow the meetings on Twitter under the hashtag #DemPlatform:

#DemPlatform Tweets

Advocating for a ban on toxic pesticides that have led to massive bee die-offs nationwide, a truck filled with millions of the dead pollinators has trundled across the country to reach its final destination on Wednesday afternoon: the front steps of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) headquarters in Washington, D.C.

“If we stop keeping bees, who’s going to pollinate your fruits and vegetables? This can’t go on.”
—Roger Williams,
Central Maryland Beekeepers Association

The truck’s arrival at EPA headquarters heralds a rally in which environmental groups, beekeepers, organic food advocates and others will “deliver over 4 million signatures urging an immediate ban on bee-killing pesticides” to the agency, writes the conservation group Friends of the Earth.

“Bees pollinate most of the world’s most common crops, including summer favorites like peaches and watermelon,” said Environment America in a press statement. “But over 40 percent of U.S. honeybee hives die each year, costing the farming and beekeeping industry more than $2 billion annually.”

As Scott Nash, CEO of Mom’s Organic, said in a statement, “What’s happening today to pollinators is no different than what happened 50 years ago with the collapse of the osprey, bald eagle, and other bird and aquatic animal populations due to the use of DDT. If we allow the chemical agribusiness industry to continue these short-sighted practices, food costs will increase as food supplies diminish.”

“In the five years since I started keeping bees, I’ve seen many hives killed by pesticides,” added James Cook, a Minnesota-based beekeeper who has been driving the truck across the country since last Monday. “If some fundamental things don’t change, it’s going to be really hard for beekeepers to adapt to the environment around us.”

United Nations head Ban Ki-moon admitted Thursday that his widely condemned removal of the Saudi Arabia-led coalition from a blacklist for killing children in Yemen was the result of direct pressure from the “key UN donor.”

“This was one of the most painful and difficult decisions I have had to make,” Ban said, adding, “It is unacceptable for member-states to exert undue pressure.”

The UN had blacklisted the coalition last week, saying it was responsible for 60 percent of the 1,953 children killed or injured in Yemen last year.

But just days later, the UN removed the group from the list, “pending a joint review by the organization and the coalition of child deaths and injuries during the year-long war in Yemen,” as Reuters reported. That move unleashed a firestorm of criticism from human rights organizations who said the move was a “shameful cave.” Ban acknowledged such criticism, referring to the “fierce reaction to my decision to temporarily remove the Saudi-led Coalition countries from the report’s annex.”

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Ahead of this weekend’s Democratic platform fight, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has once again taken aim at the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), skewering the corporate-friendly trade deal she says will allow for “open season on laws that make people safer.”

Warren makes the remarks about the 12-nation trade deal, which still needs Congressional approval, to progressive activists in a video released Thursday by social change network CREDO Action.

The deal, Warren says in the video, “isn’t about helping American workers set the rules. It’s about letting giant corporations rig the rules—on everything from patent protection to food safety standards —all to benefit themselves.”

Even in the drafting process industry representatives could exert influence—but there was no voice to represent American workers or consumers, she says. “A rigged process produces a rigged outcome,” she says.

One specific provision of the deal drawing Warren’s ire (as it has before) is the “wonky-sounding” Investor State Dispute Settlement, or ISDS.

“This is the part that gives a huge boost to big multinational companies when they want to challenge a country’s laws they don’t like,” she says. They do that not through courts but “industry-friendly arbitration panels staffed with corporate lawyers.” Faced with potential billions in fines, “some countries will just back down and change their regulations,” she says.

“Workers, environmentalists, and human rights advocates don’t get the right to use ISDS; only big corporations do. That’s a rigged system,” she says. Warren cites specific examples of ISDS challenges— last year when Canadian taxpayers got stuck with a $300 million bill after the country said a company couldn’t expand of a quarry off the coast of Nova Scotia, and when Keystone XL company TransCanada used the ISDS provision of NAFTA to seek $15 billion from the U.S. for its rejection of the pipeline.

With ISDS in the TPP, Warren says, “It will be open season on laws that make people safer—but cut into corporate profits.”

She concludes by urging activists to continue their fight stop the TPP.