The torture cover-up continues
by digby
This article in today's New York Times is enough to put me in a bad mood already. Apparently, George Tenent's protege, John Brennen, is going out of his way to protect his former bosses reputation (and his own) with this outrageous attempts a cover up of the torture report:
Just after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify hundreds of pages of a withering report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, C.I.A. Director John O. Brennan convened a meeting of the men who had played a role overseeing the program in its seven-year history.
The spies, past and present, faced each other around the long wooden conference table on the seventh floor of the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Northern Virginia: J. Cofer Black, head of the agency’s counterterrorism center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks; the undercover officer who now holds that job; and a number of other former officials from the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Over the speakerphone came the distinctive, Queens-accented voice of George J. Tenet.
Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.
Gosh I wonder why some people are skeptical of secret government. It's not as if they ever do anything wrong. Sure, they may have "gone a little far" in their zeal to protect us from the evil ones, but they'll never do it again I'm sure. And sure, the fact that it was not only immoral but also completely ineffective should not in any way require an accounting:
The April meeting at C.I.A. headquarters highlighted how much of the agency is still seeded with officers who participated in the detention and interrogation program, which Mr. Obama officially ended during his first week in office in 2009.
At one point during the meeting, the current head of the counterterrorism center, an officer with the first name Mike, told Mr. Brennan that roughly 200 people under his leadership had at some point participated in the interrogation program. They wanted to know, he said, how Mr. Brennan planned to defend them in public against accusations that the C.I.A. engaged in systematic torture and lied about its efficacy.
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Wagging a finger at the correspondent, Scott Pelley, Mr. Tenet said over and over, “We don’t torture people.”
“No, listen to me. No, listen to me. I want you to listen to me,” he went on. “Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through: The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of that fact that there was so much we did not know. I know that this program has saved lives. I know we’ve disrupted plots.”
The Senate Intelligence Committee’s report is expected to directly challenge this contention. Several people who have read the report said that it concludes that the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods broke up no terrorist plots and that agency officials repeatedly inflated the value of the program.
No kidding. It makes you wonder if what they're really covering up the fact that they tortured for the fun of it. We know they're covering up the fact that they lied repeatedly to the "overseers" --- which, once again, makes a mockery of the idea that "oversights" alone is enough to keep the government from running amock. (Of course, if you think torturing prisoners is a good idea then you'll think this is all a-ok.)
This is getting intense:
A senior Senate Democrat is firing a warning shot at the White House against stalling the release of a report about the past use of torture by the U.S. intelligence community.
Sen. Ron Wyden is talking with his colleagues about the possibility of using a seldom-invoked procedure to declassify an Intelligence Committee report on the use of torture in the event the White House does not move ahead quickly.
Speaking with reporters on a variety of subjects Thursday, the Oregon Democrat referred to the Senate’s “Resolution 400″ — the Abraham A. Ribicoff-sponsored resolution that established the Intelligence Committee back in 1976.
Wyden said he was discussing invoking the resolution “in order to move this along if we have to, through the committee process, to get it declassified.”
Matt Bai of Yahoo! News reported earlier Thursday that Wyden mentioned the same procedure to him. And it was not the first time he’s discussed the possibility. Wyden previously explained the provision in October 2013, KATU reported.
The Senate Intelligence Committee voted on April 3 to provide for declassification of the report into the use of harsh interrogation practices by the CIA during the administration of President George W. Bush. That action set the gears in motion for declassification review. The report is now in the hands of the White House.
Asked Thursday about a senator discussing the prospects of using legislative action to release the report, the National Security Council press office sent along a lengthy statement that did not outline a timeline for release.
This is a very interesting dynamic. You have a Democratic White House covering up for the CIA and a former Republican White House and the Republican minority in the Senate staying quiet to protect the reputation of the CIA and their former Republican White House. And you have the Democratic majority in the Senate in the unpleasant position of having to defy a Democratic White House to reveal the cover-up. Who knows if they will actually do it? For all the "hair on fire" hand signals and hints in Pig Latin from the Democrats who have allegedly been appalled by the government's secret, unethical behavior in the GWOT, there has yet to be any real confrontation between the branches. Senators have power too --- and yet even they know that to exercise it will bring the government hammer down hard on them and they will be vilified by much of the public who will undoubtedly consider them traitors. This is what we rely on for "oversight."
On the other hand, if you can't take a principled stand against torture then maybe being a political leader isn't really your calling. This one isn't a tough decision. The US cannot ever be considered a decent nation if it doesn't grapple with this honestly and openly. Even if nobody is ever held accountable --- which would be yet another barrier to any claim to morality --- the truth absolutely must be told and the government must admit to what it did. These institutions should not be allowed to protect their reputations (not that the individuals who conceived it, legalized it and ordered it shouldn't be punished as well...)
I still find it hard to wrap my mind around the fact that this is even controversial. Torture.
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