CIA Director John Brennan has just completed a press conference at headquarters over the torture report released Tuesday. Thanks to our intrepid press corps we didn't get any questions on the intelligence benefits of "rectal rehydration" or learn what disciplinary measures other than promotions were handed out to the CIA operatives who made what Brennan called "mistakes." You know, mistakes like destroying interrogation tapes, undertaken because agents thought they were "doing the right thing." Not, of course, because they were covering their asses or because they were ordered to do so by people further up the chain of command covering
their asses.
Nobody asked if Brennan would resign, as Sen. Mark Udall again called for him to do in his speech Tuesday in which he labeled Brennan a serial liar who is still lying. What we got was a brief series of not-gonna-answer-that responses, half-answers, half-baked answers, seemingly reasonable answers unless you know the history, the concession that "mistakes" were made (but, of course, of course, of course, they've been corrected) and the unsurprising news that Brennan thinks the discussion this week about torture has been "over the top." This from a guy who says that drone attacks have "done some wonderful things."
Major takeaway: Come the next crisis, nothing—certainly not John Brennan—stands in the way of CIA "mistakes" being made again. We also learned that the euphemizing of torture just hadn't gone far enough. So, instead of "enhanced interrogation techniques," which sounds like the title of a panel at a management seminar, Brennan introduced us to EITs, which sound like stock market derivatives. Call that a euphemojo.
Some tweeters reacted:
Seriously, fellow members of the press: do NOT go along with this Orwell newspeak formulation of “EITs.” They can say it. We don’t have to.
— @JamesFallows
And by the way, if you're a reporter calling torture an "EIT," you're not objective. You're anti-dictionary.
— @jamescdownie
"Enhanced interrogation" what a euphemism. It wasn't slavery, it was enhanced labor. It wasn't genocide, it was enhanced gentrification.
— @AdamSerwer
Hard to know whether to laugh, cry or puke.