It is one thing not to prosecute war crimes – even though failure to do so violates the core of the Geneva Conventions. It is another not even to allow the public airing of what actually happened in America during the Bush-Cheney era, even though the findings have been reached exhaustively, at vast public expense and under bipartisan auspices. What on earth is Obama afraid of? That the CIA will revolt and refuse to do its job? That John Brennan’s friends will squirm uncomfortably in the face of their own complicity in barbarism? W. Paul Smith calls on the administration to release the damn report already:
This week marks the one-year anniversary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s adoption of a sweeping 6,300-page study detailing the CIA’s post-9/11 detention, rendition, torture and interrogation program. But the public has yet to see one word of it. That’s because, even though it deals with some of the most important and contentious issues this country has grappled with in recent years, the entire report remains classified.
Here’s what we do know about the report:
First, it is almost certainly the most exhaustive, detailed investigation of the CIA torture program to date. The committee spent more than three years researching the program, including reviewing six million pages of documents.
Second, according to senators who have seen it, the report includes a damning indictment and repudiation of the longstanding claims that torture and ill treatment led to accurate and actionable intelligence.
Conor chimes in:
[T]he Obama Administration, which promised voters that it would be the most transparent in history, has bowed to pressure from a faction within the CIA to keep secret the most thorough accounting we have of the agency’s lawless, immoral behavior during the Bush years. In doing so, Team Obama makes it less likely that we learn the lessons of CIA torture, and more likely that America tortures again one day.
The Dish 