Folha de São Paulo - Op-ed section - page A2

It was only this week that I took a careful look at the documents released under the U.S. freedom of information act at the request of Valor and posted on their website. The most interesting document there is a telegram from Brasilia sent by the then U.S. ambassador John J. Danilovich on 22 June 2005, commenting on the new Ministra da Casa Civil, Dilma Rousseff. This is document E169 on valoronline.com.br/PDF/20050622Brasilia.pdf).

Most documents declassified by the U.S. government are "redacted". That is, segments of the document regarded as being too sensitive or contain intelligence information, are removed. Most of the documents released to Valor have major cuts of this sort.

For the historian these elisions make use of declassified documents like these very problematic. The remarkable thing about document E169, however, is the "redaction" is so incompetently done that when the document is printed out anyone can read the censored parts. In other words, the bits that were supposed to be cut appear instead highlighted much in the manner students use yellow markers to highlight passages of a text they want to remember.

So what did Ambassador Danilovich write about Dilma Rousseff that the State Department decided to suppress?

On page one it is the comment that Rousseff is "blunt and demanding." No big surprise to Brazilians. On page 3 it is a reference to the fact she is separated from her husband, is "stubborn" and a "workaholic." But the major "redaction" is on page 2, and it involves her activities as a guerrilla leader: "The Joan of Arc of Subversion." The telegram discusses her role in planning the "theft of Ademar's Safe," the "legendary robbery...that broke into the Rio apartment of the lover of former Sao Paulo Governor Ademar de Barros, netting US$ 2.5 million that Ademar has stashed there." Finally the ambassador notes Dilma Rousseff's " 22 days of brutal electric-shock torture".

How very odd that the State Department thinks this sort of information is too sensitive to release to the public. After all, If Dilma Rousseff is ever elected President of Brazil, and John McCain, who was also subjected to brutal torture when he was a prisoner of war, is elected president of the U.S., they will be two heads of state with the unique moral authority to unequivocally oppose the use of torture as a policy of state.

KENNETH MAXWELL is a weekly op-ed columnist (every Thursday) for Folha de São Paulo, Brazil's leading newspaper