Author: Andrew Sullivan

The Notorious E.I.T.

May I just second the Motion?

https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/543122911033569281

https://twitter.com/tanehisicoates/status/543119775279222784

Meteor Blades of Daily Kos picks up on the CIA director’s favorite term for torture :

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.

One day, I promise you, they will either look back on this acronym as a stain on this generation and an embarrassment to the world. Or it will not be a world worth living in.

John Brennan Is Still Lying

US-POLITICS-OBAMA-INTELLIGENCE

I watched the CIA Director’s speech today, in which he actually described the CIA as an agency “speaking truth to power.” He got that the wrong way round. There is no organization in the US government that exercises the kind of power the CIA does – over the presidency, and the Congress, and the media. It is unimaginable that any other agency in government could commit war crimes, torture innocents, murder people, wreck this country’s moral standing … and yet escape any consequences for their actions. There is no other government agency that launches elaborate public relations campaigns to discredit and undermine its Senate oversight committee. There is no other organization whose head can tell blatant lies about spying on its overseers and receive the president’s wholehearted support. There is no other agency where you can murder someone already in your captivity and get away with it. That is incredible power – and there is no greater power than the power to torture.

As for the truth part, Brennan has to concede what the CIA has already conceded: that they lied to the president and to the Congress many, many times on the efficacy of torture. But Brennan describes these lies, as the CIA did in its formal response to the report, as “imprecision”. It was therefore merely “imprecise” that, to take one of many examples, the “Second Wave” attack was discovered thanks to torture. But either something was procured through torture, or it wasn’t. That’s not imprecise; it’s an either/or. And it was presented by the CIA as a categorical product of torture – which played a part in devising the legal memos that gave these crimes a patina of temporary formal legality. That is not imprecision; it is misrepresentation.

Here’s the most we’ll ever get from our dark side overlord:

CIA officers’ actions that did comport with the law and policy should neither be criticized nor conflated with the actions of the few who did not follow the guidance issued. At the same time, none of these lapses should be excused, downplayed or denied. In some instances, we simply failed to live up to the standards that we set for ourselves, that the American people expect of us.

Translation: the bulk of the torture was perfectly acceptable; a small part of it wasn’t. Have there been any consequences for those who committed the war crimes outside those allowed for by the spurious legal memos? Nope. Has anyone been fired? Not that we know. Are most of the people involved in these war crimes still walking the halls at Langley? You bet they are. And Brennan admitted today that he knew full well what was going on as the torture program was constructed.

Now this weird circumlocution on a central question:

I have already stated that our reviews indicate that the detention and interrogation program produced useful intelligence that helped the United States thwart attack plans, capture terrorists and save lives. But let me be clear: We have not concluded that it was the use of EITs within that program that allowed us to obtain useful information from detainees subjected to them. The cause and effect relationship between the use of EITs and useful information subsequently provided by the detainee is, in my view, unknowable.

So we are now in Rumsfeld’s post-modern universe. What Brennan has repeatedly said was that we got intelligence from those in the program, but now he is saying that the intelligence was not provably a result of the torture. What he is trying to insinuate is that long after being tortured, some suspects may have given intelligence under legal and humane interrogation that helped. All I can say is that the report meticulously demonstrates that this is not the case. Or let me allow Dianne Feinstein to put it succinctly:

This is a simple matter: before or after? In the coming days, the Dish is going to go through critical cases in the report to show that Brennan is still lying about this, seeking refuge in bullshit notions of “unknowability” because what we do know from the CIA’s own documents absolutely refutes his case.

And notice the only reason Brennan objects to torture:

I believe effective, non-coercive methods are available to elicit such information; methods that do not have a counterproductive impact on our national security and on our international standing.

Brennan goes on to lie again that torture helped us find Osama bin Laden. This is disproved – not challenged or questioned, but disproved – in the report. And continuing to suggest – against the evidence – that torture may have helped get that monster is an invitation for such an evil to be imported back into the the US in the future. And, indeed, Brennan concedes that it is perfectly possible that torture will return:

I defer to the policymakers in future times when there is going to be the need to be able to ensure that this country stays safe if we face a similar type of crisis.

We have a CIA whose head believes in the efficacy of torture, and that the only reason to refrain from it is that it hurts our national security and international standing. We have a CIA head who will not rule out the use of torture in the future. We have a CIA head who believes that much of the torture conducted in the Bush-Cheney years was legal. And we have a CIA head prepared to argue in public that the facts and documented evidence in a summary of the CIA’s own documents are untrue. Because he says so.

And he wants us to end this debate and move. He has to be kidding.

(Photo: Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John Brennan talks with the Director of National Intelligence James Clapper  before US President Barack Obama spoke about the National Security Agency and intelligence agencies surveillance techniques at the US Department of Justice on January 17, 2014. By Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images.)

Quotes For The Day III

“Warning that it would be reckless to release the full findings to the general public, critics in Washington condemned the Senate’s 480-page report detailing the CIA’s interrogation tactics Tuesday, saying it puts the country at considerable risk of transparency,” – The Onion, on Tuesday.

“I think there’s more than enough transparency that has happened over the last couple days,” – CIA Director John Brennan, today.

 

Darkness Visible: Your Thoughts, Ctd

Below are more emails from you on a range of things related to the Senate report:

I’ve been a registered Republican since ’84, the year I became eligible to vote.  Although since the GW Bush era I’ve voted and thought much more like an independent, I had never gotten around to re-registering as an independent for a variety of reasons, mostly inertia.

Until today.

I am so repulsed by many Republicans’ support for torture and their general reaction to this torture report, that I am unable to align myself with them any more.  On a chat board today, I read a description of McCain as a “RINO and a scumbag” for his having denounced torture, and the poster was unaware of how damning this was of the GOP.  You reminded me of how conservative stalwarts like Starr, Buckley and Will unequivocally rejected torture just a few short years ago, and compared it to McConnell’s and Butters’ reflexively cynical response to the report. Oh how fast and far we have fallen!

I just went on-line and re-registered as an independent.  I’ll be writing Reince Preibus to let him know why. I feel a bit cleaner now.

Send one to the White House as well. Another reader:

There’s something I haven’t ever seen you address but that I now see all the more clearly with the publication of this report: why we really did it.  It was NOT for the value of the information gained.  That much is clear.  So, what then? This was not a Foucauldian effort to scare the potential terrorists.  It happened because we feel that these people deserve some form of punishment deeper than prison.  Until we really call that out and confront it, I don’t think there is much point in the discussion at all.  We tortured because it felt good.

Another would agree:

Go back and watch the Jose Rodriguez 60 Minutes interview. When asked explicitly whether waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammad 183 times was justified (or, rather, being subjected to 183 “pours” in a half dozen sessions), he replies:

Can I say something about Khalid Sheikh Mohammed? He’s the one that was responsible for the death of Danny Pearl, the Wall Street reporter. He slit his throat in front of a camera. I don’t know what type of man it takes to cut the throat of someone in front of you like that, but I can tell you that this is an individual who probably didn’t give a rat’s ass about having water poured on his face.

It wasn’t about collecting intelligence.  It was about punishment and revenge.

Moreover, another turns to popular culture:

Reading through your live-blog post of the torture report was surreal.  Really, that’s the only word I can use.  You commented at one point that if we were watching this in a movie, the perpetrators would be Nazis.  Sadly, I think that’s wrong in today’s America.

Think of the network TV that we have been fed since 9/11.  Jack Bauer’s 24, Criminal Minds, Stalker – a plethora of violence that is somehow “ok” because it’s gotten past network censors, because the censors are far more concerned with a kid seeing a naked body part or hearing a person say “shit” than letting the kid watch a serial killer kidnap someone and, yes, torture them for a solid hour of TV.

Beyond what this report says about America and our indescribably stupid paranoia and fear post 9/11, it is a reflection of what we’re seeing in popular culture every day.  We are celebrating people who torture people, whether it’s the government calling them patriots because they were willing (and some probably enjoyed) seeing a man repeatedly almost drowned, or it’s the media-consuming public who make Criminal Minds (a torture porn show if I’ve ever seen one) or 24 top-rated television shows.

We’ve simply become immune to abject violence. Combine that with the idea that was pounded into our heads for the last 13 years that EVERYONE is out to get us and we must do ANYTHING to stop them and I can sadly understand how this happened, how this was justified, and how everyone who should’ve known better turned a blind eye to what we as a people were becoming.

Another sees abject violence carried out by our current administration:

I am usually a bleeding heart, but as horrific as the details in the report are, I feel mostly ambivalent and I’m tying to figure out why. I think there are a few reasons. After Bush, the Pentagon, CIA, and White House have switched from black sites and EIT to signature strikes and a disposition matrix. The fact that innocent people were caught up in the black sites and tortured is the worst part of the program, but thousands have been incinerated or torn to pieces by hunks of metal because they were standing too close to a person the White House wanted permanently disposed of.

Another turns back to the previous administration:

Why won’t Bush or Rubio call Lynndie England a patriot? She seems to fit the bill now right? Her and 10 others were court-marshaled for doing their job according to Bush and Cheney.

Another has a bit of dark humor:

Oh, how I would have loved to have heard Hitch respond to a Vanity Fair editor asking him to try rectal-feeding after waterboarding.

Another is just dark:

I can’t say that I disagree with why you’re feeling such anguish.  I certainly feel it, and I don’t know how anyone with any heart at all couldn’t feel it after reading about what happened in those dank torture chambers and rape rooms.  Who’d have ever thought we’d be talking about American rape rooms?

But I think your (and your reader’s) immigrant love of America is a bit too forgiving of this country.  We are a country founded on slavery; we believed in Manifest Destiny and destroyed the indigenous population (because we could); we acquiesced to Jim Crow after a bloody Civil War; we dropped nuclear weapons on civilians; our own CIA had already perpetrated illegal acts on humans in the name of interrogating and torturing them; we had assassination units, and it wasn’t the first time.  When you express shock about the CIA treating the human body as an experimental subject, I think of how they’ve done that on American civilians.  When you are surprised about a PR campaign for torture by the CIA, I can’t help but think how it makes sense, because they have such practice at media manipulation.  The list goes on and on.

To only see the United States as a shining city on a hill is a mirage.  It has never been that.  We are a gray capital, compromised and stitched together as a kludge.  This is not “America hating” or self loathing.  We simply are what we are.  This isn’t an excuse for torture; it’s context for our national capacity for depravity.

We’re a great country.  And we’re criminal fuck ups.  That our tax dollars paid the CIA to torture innocents is not “the end of America as much of the world has known it.”  It’s just America.  It’s the United States removed from its ludicrous bumper-sticker sentimentality and empty words.  It’s our truth.  I hate that, but it’s our truth.

Another reader, however, looks at the glass half full:

Like most, I’m horrified by what the torture report reveals. I also worry how the report will influence how Americans are treated in other countries and by other regimes – whether they will use the report to justify their treatment of our soldiers. Of course that’s exactly how we should determine whether we think something is torture – if we would deem it so if it was how captured Americans were treated. (There, I think there’s little question.) I’m also angered by the response by many on the right.

BUT, I think the one bright spot in all of this is the very fact of the report and that it’s being publicly released (albeit in redacted form). As much as other countries may justifiably complain about what this says about our own human rights and asking what right do we now have to question theirs, can anyone imagine that countries like China, North Korea, Russia, Syria, etc. would ever release such a report. Hopefully, this report is what will push us to correct our behavior. Without such reports, what would provoke other countries to ever correct theirs.

Another also tries to stay positive:

Patience, patience. I do believe that prosecutions are better handled internationally and those prosecutions will take time.  Will all the bad actors be prosecuted no, but just as Nazis are still hunted and tracked US War Criminals will be hunted down and some will be brought to justice.  Look at the length of time it has taken dictators in other countries to be brought to justice, often it takes decades. Personally, I am unhappy that this is the political reality, but I do know that these kinds of crimes are likely to be punished, probably within my lifetime.

However,  often the punishment is not what brings healing and stability.  It is telling the truth and honoring the victims that brings healing.  The Senate Committe did what it had to do: oversee the CIA, and the world has not crumbled overnight.  I am willing to bet that the world will not crumble and that as others see that the truth can be told,  more and more secrets will come to light in the future. Eventually we will be able to move away from the paranoid world-view these torturers let loose.

Bad Cop, Evil Cop

A reader writes:

I was shocked by something James Mitchell (one of the supposed architects of the torture program) said in his VICE interview: torture wasn’t supposed to yield actionable intelligence and he’d be “stunned” if it did. Why? Because we tortured people just to play good cop/bad cop and to loosen them up to other questioning!  Seriously.

I’m in disbelief, and I just wanted to make sure you all saw it.  Thanks for all your hard work on this incredibly important story.

#ReadTheReport

Every Dishhead with a Twitter account should RT this tweet from Senator Feinstein:

Let’s spread #ReadTheReport far and wide (and blow #IHateCartmanBrah out of the water). Read all of DiFi’s tweets thus far, in chronological order, below:

Follow Feinstein here.

Quote For The Day II

“That there are elements of the American government still arguing against this cold blast of truth, offering up the craven fear that the rest of the world might see us as we actually are, or that our enemies will perhaps use the evidence of our sadism to justify violent retribution or political maneuver — this further cowardice only adds to the national humiliation.

This is not one of the world’s great powers behaving as such, and it is certainly no force for good in the world.  This might as well be the Spanish national amnesia following the death of Franco, or a post-war West Germany without the stomach for the necessary self-reflection. Shit, even the fragile, post-apartheid democracy of South Africa managed to openly conduct hearings and attempt some measure of apology and reconciliation in the wake of the previous regime’s brutalities.  Not us. Not the United States. We’re too weak to endure any such moral reflection without the attempt itself descending into moronic partisan banter. That’s right. Here, in America, we are — today — actually torturing other human beings with exacting cruelty in secret and then arguing about whether we can dare discuss it in public” – David Simon.

The CIA’s Sense Of Fairness

Former director Michael Hayden feels that he and his colleagues have been wronged:

It’s as if we were tried and convicted in absentia. We were not given an opportunity to mount a defense. And there was no discovery process by which alleged evidence could be revealed and challenged.

Friedersdorf puts this in its appropriate context:

So imprisoning Muslims without charges or trial is morally defensible, as Hayden sees it, as is killing without due process, even when scores of children predictably die as “collateral damage,” and even when U.S. citizens are targeted in secret. The no-fly list? Also just fine, no interviews required. But criticizing Hayden in a Senate report that was researched for years, based on CIA documents, and given to the current CIA director to review before publication? Criticizing him in a report that results in no penalties whatsoever without due process? That’s an outrage to him. Why, a man’s reputation is at stake!