Ski forecast in hell: packed powder base, inches of fresh powder on all slopes.  That’s no more surprising than finding that Senator Dianne Feinstein and I agree on something. (I quote the entire article below.)

Few things are more vital to protection of civil liberties than government transparency. Though I most often oppose her conventional and predictable statist positions, she is fairly aggressive in guarding against unnecessary government secrecy.  The current and previous presidential administrations have expanded federal opacity to dangerous levels.  Kudos to Senator Feinstein for demanding better…at least in this case.

The CIA’s internal watchdog claims it accidentally deleted its only copy of the controversial “torture report” outlining the agency’s use of enhanced interrogations techniques, the latest wrinkle in the saga over the report’s publication.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,700-page report has not yet been made public by the Obama administration and has been at the center over a years-long fight to make the report public. There are other copies of the report at other federal agencies.

Former Chair and current ranking Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein has been pushing for the report to be released while Republican Chairman Richard Burr has opposed even distribution of the full report to the executive branch, let alone the public.

Yahoo News first reported Monday that the CIA inspector general had “mistakenly” deleted both the electronic and hard copy of the report. Yahoo reported that officials deleted the uploaded version of the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that contained the report.

Other agencies have been given copies of the report but the development has alarmed Feinstein, who immediately wrote to CIA Director John Brennan and Attorney General Loretta Lynch calling for the IG to be given another copy “immediately.”

“Your prompt response will allay my concern that this was more than an ‘accident,'” Feinstein wrote pointedly to Brennan and Lynch.

The error comes just days after a federal appeals court Friday rejected efforts to release the full version of the report, upholding a lower court decision that said the report is a congressional record exempt from disclosure laws.

The committee released a 500-plus-page summary of the report to the public in 2014, but the American Civil Liberties Union sued to obtain the full version.