It's taken more than five years for the Senate report of the Central Intelligence Agency's use of rendition, secret prisons and torture to be completed and released, but today is the day. The 6,300-page torture report was completed two years ago along with a 500-page executive summary. Instead of being shown to the public, however, both were sidelined while CIA censors got to work hacking out the parts of the summary they didn't like and fighting with the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence over it.
It is that redacted summary, not the full report, that is being released. Unless some brave senator chooses to have all 6,300 classified pages included in the Congressional Record, chances are only a tiny number of Americans will get to see that longer document for years, if then. In this regard, many hopeful eyes have been cast in the direction of soon-to-be ex-Sen. Mark Udall, a member of the SSCI who lost his Colorado re-election campaign last month.
Responding on Sunday and Monday to the pending release, the right wing had one of its signature tantrums. One of the unrepentant architects of the torture program, former Vice President Dick Cheney, had his say, as did Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Michigan, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who told CNN, "I think this is a terrible idea." Intelligence arrangements with foreign governments and the lives of agents and contacts would be at risk, he said.
One freakout came from K.T. McFarland, now an analyst with Fox News, who served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the first half of the Reagan administration. Still sticking to the Fox mantra of “the alleged use of torture by the CIA,” McFarland declared that releasing the summary report is all about punishing the Bush administration more than 10 years after the fact. And, even though the report has been tied up for two years, she added:
Put bluntly, Democrats in the Senate are behaving like tenants who got evicted and decide to trash the house on their way out the door.
More can be found below the fold.
Releasing the summary report during what is left of this month was the only option. A Republican chairman takes over the SSCI in January. He'll replace Dianne Feinstein, who has been quite cozy with the CIA, one of the staunch defenders of its targeted killing program, but became incensed and said so publicly in March after it was discovered the CIA had secretly meddled with the committee's investigation.
CIA Director John Brennan denied Feinstein's accusations at the time, but this turned out to be a flat-out lie. Only the most naive of observers could think he didn't know what his subordinates were doing. He nevertheless remains at his post.
The SSCI chairman-to-be is Richard Burr, Republican senator from North Carolina. He is an even fiercer ally of the CIA than Feinstein, noting at the time of her angry March remarks:
"I personally don’t believe that anything that goes on in the intelligence committee should ever be discussed publicly," he told reporters. "Certainly classified information, it’s breaking the law to discuss that. If I had my way, with the exception of nominees, there would never be a public intelligence hearing."
Meanwhile, McFarland insinuated to Fox viewers that only America-haters would release the report.
We've heard this garbage before. It was, after all, 40 years ago this month—Dec. 22, 1974— that an article by investigative reporter Seymour Hersh appeared in The New York Times under the headline: Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Anti-War forces. The revelations of illegal domestic spying by the agency catalyzed an investigation of the CIA, FBI and NSA by the Pike Committee in the House, led by Democratic Rep. Otis Pike of New York, and the Church Committee, overseen by Democratic Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, who was the SSCI chairman at the time. Assassinations, infiltration of legal, peaceful organizations and all manner of dirty tricks were revealed by the committee.
Of NSA, which at the time was scarcely mentioned in public except jokingly as No Such Agency, Church was blunt:
“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter,” Church said. “There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyrant, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.
"I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."
While what they discovered in their investigations was bad enough, neither Church nor Pike were faced with evidence of torture authorized by the top leaders of our nation.
One pushback message we will hear today and in the days to come are reiterations of Dick Cheney's claims that torture worked to provide crucial information after the attacks of September 11, including some that eventually helped ferret out Osama bin Laden in his Pakistan hideout. We know this is damnable bunk.
But, even if it were true, that wouldn't make it right.
Marcy Wheeler, the brilliant scholar-blogger who has for years pried deeply into available sources to come up with her extraordinary analyses of some of America's darker moments, points out that torturing information out of captives was only one part of the reason for doing so. Recruiting spies and spreading propaganda were two others.
And the purpose of that propaganda? Tying Iraq to al Qaeda and raising the threat of nuclear or dirty bomb terror:
Then it raises the really horrible possibility that Cheney pushed torture because it would produce the stories he wanted told. It would be difficult to distinguish whether Cheney believed this stuff and therefore that’s what the torture produced or whether Cheney wanted these stories told and that’s what the torture produced.
As Steven Kleinman said in an important Jason Leopold and Jeff Kaye story on this subject, the torture CIA used was designed to get false confessions, not accurate information:
“This is the guidebook to getting false confessions, a system drawn specifically from the communist interrogation model that was used to generate propaganda rather than intelligence,” Kleinman said in an interview. “If your goal is to obtain useful and reliable information this is not the source book you should be using.”
The people who approved torture had the means of knowing—should have known—it would elicit false confessions. It’s just that no one can prove whether that was the entire point or not.
Sen. Udall has said that people will be disgusted by what they read in the torture summary. No doubt true. And that's just from a highly condensed, expurgated summary of the SSCI's report of its investigation.
Disgust, however, is only one of the emotions this document of our leaders' vile behavior should engender. Anger ought to be foremost. Anger at the men and women who chose not just to look the other way, not just to treat human beings inhumanly, not just to cover it up, but to order these savage acts and, when ultimately exposed, to slime us all with the claim that they were necessary to protect our security and maintain our liberty.
Then there is the disgust and anger that those who gave the orders will never see the inside of a prison cell and some who carried out the orders have been promoted, some of them multiple times.
We have one administration to blame for ordering torture and another to blame for failing to call those directly responsible to justice. Nothing in the document released today will change that. But in another 20 or 40 years, it's even money that some new investigation will reveal what happens when criminals—war criminals—go unpunished. Their successors think they can get away with it too.