Via Democracy Now:
Admin Delays Torture Report for 2nd Time
The Justice Department meanwhile has announced a widely anticipated CIA inspector general report on the Bush administration’s torture program will be delayed until shortly before the upcoming July 4th long weekend. It’s the second time the Obama administration has delayed the report’s release.
In other words, Obama's DOJ are a bunch of worthless cowards, and instead of owning up to the contents of the report, they're pulling a classic information warfare maneuver, like so:
- Release bad news at the beginning of a holiday weekend, when nobody will be paying attention.
For the uninitiated, this is called the "Friday Night News Dump", and it's a time-honored tradition in political news cycle management.
- Release this particular piece of bad news, of the sort which makes America look really, really bad, on July 4th weekend.
That way, when everyone goes back to work on Monday, they'll be full of good, patriotic feelings about their country, and therefore be inoculated against phrases like "violations of international law", "war crimes", "systematic program of torture ordered from the Vice President's office", and etc.
This is not a coincidence. Obama's press office does stuff like this all the time. And seeing as neither Obama or his DOJ seem to have any intention of upholding the rule of law when it comes to accountability for torture, it would be politically difficult for him if Americans actually became aware of what is contained within this report.
It's shameful, and it's insulting. The good news, however, is that the nature of the news cycle is changing. This report won't just go away, and people like myself are not going to quit until every tax-paying citizen of this great country of ours is acutely aware of what was done to detainees in their names, with their money.
And then people like me will promptly get frustrated and give up when those people say things like "well, they killed 3,000 Americans...", or "if your enemy fights dirty...", or "what if there was a ticking time bomb...", or whatever other nonsense was featured on 24 last season.
My uncle, a proud dittohead Limbaugh-zombie, gave my favorite repsonse to the torture question so far. No rationalization, no excuses, just denial. "We didn't torture anyone". I didn't even bother to mention the vast mountain of incontrovertible evidence, including statements by American generals, because he would just write it all off as "liberal bias" as he generally does when he disagrees with me.
A responsible media wouldn't fall for this sort of thing. They would instead wait, read the report, and save their analysis and reporting for Monday, in prime time, because its findings directly contradict the statements and rationalizations of the "torture works" crowd.
Unfortunately, we do not have a responsible media, and by Monday, this story won't be "timely" anymore, and therefore have limited news value.
Nothing will be changed, and the pundits who will be proven liars with the findings of this report will still have jobs, and will continue to spray bulls**t all over our political discourse with impunity.
America the beautiful, and etc.
Cross-posted at beatpanda.co.cc