One person we know bears responsibility.
The Senate Intelligence Committee's publicly released torture report summary is "only" seven percent redacted, according to the White House. But critics say the redactions were often unnecessary—in a few cases, like the identities of
psychologists James E. Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, the redacted information was already known—and, more troublingly, that the redactions may protect the worst of the worst actors from identification:
Blacking out most CIA officers’ names rather than providing pseudonyms made it almost impossible to track what knowledge they had from emails, memos or experience with other interrogations.
“It makes it very difficult to track the chain of knowledge,” said Andrea Prasow of Human Rights Watch. “You don’t know if the same person who got memos saying this isn’t working later said everything’s fine, this guy’s talking and then decided to up the severity of the abuse. … It’s designed to obfuscate.”
Well, exactly. The White House tried to have the report's release delayed, the White House and the CIA fought to redact even more information ... there's no question that the intent is to shield torturers from accountability, even the accountability of public identification. Still, thanks to the release of the summary, we
know more now about how brutal and ineffective the torture program was. It's one of many needed steps toward accountability and transparency.