“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.
MIKE LUCKOVICH – What We Beheld in the #TortureReport pic.twitter.com/IfLsaTWcEs
— ScoutandAbout (@about_scout) December 11, 2014
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.
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.
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.
“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.
Taking those music-synced, Christmas-light shows to 11:
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!
As several commentators noted when the UVA rape story broke (and before it unraveled), the campus rape reporting system mandated under Title IX clearly isn’t working properly, as universities tend to prioritize covering their own asses over ensuring that charges are handled justly. As UVA is hardly the first university to make a mess of this process, it seems like a no-brainer that these cases should be investigated by the police, not college administrators. Libby Nelson, however, argues that colleges should have at least some role in responding to rape allegations:
Imagine a college sexual assault case that is reported to authorities — both to local police and to campus officials. On campus, the investigation takes around 60 days, according to the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights. In the local justice system, it can drag on even longer. In the meantime, the student who filed the complaint might have to sit next to the student she accused in class or run into him in the dining hall. A victim of sexual assault might fail a class or want to take part of the semester off.
Police departments can’t do anything about any of this. But colleges can. They can shift students’ housing assignments, campus jobs, or class schedules. They can offer free counseling services. They can give students who say they were assaulted a break from a midterm exam, or let them retake classes that they failed because they were emotionally upset in the aftermath of an assault. And they can do these things immediately, before a hearing or even an investigation is concluded. That’s one reason why colleges have a role to play when sexual assault happens on campus. Colleges can, and are supposed to, take those actions even if the police are already investigating.
It’s one thing to shuffle housing assignments and class schedules, and quite another to expel accused rapists without solid evidence of wrongdoing. The problem arises when universities are called upon to render what are essentially criminal verdicts and punishments, which only the justice system can do. But Max Ehrenfreund suggests that forcing universities to report rapes to the cops might not be such a great solution:
At the University of Virginia, the key problem appears to have been unresponsive school officials — not unresponsive cops. The victims described in the Rolling Stone account could have sought the police’s help if they wanted it, but they did not.
Now, many are saying that police should be involved in every alleged case of sexual violence. But some advocates for victims suggest that mandatory reporting to police could have unintended consequences — while ignoring the real issues of college administrators not doing enough to stop sexual assault. It could make campuses even more dangerous, they say, by discouraging students from reporting sexual assault and preventing administrators from getting the information they need to keep students safe.
Some victims of rape say they would not have notified their university if the school officials had been required to report the incident to police. Victims, some say, might not want the attention and scrutiny that comes from a criminal investigation. Others may be uncomfortable with the idea of repeatedly describing in detail what happened to them to law enforcement officers.
Alexandra Brodsky and Elizabeth Deutsch make another case for why universities need to also be involved in handling sexual assault cases, looking back at the case that established this requirement back in the 1970s:
What Alexander [v. Yale] helped to establish … is that campus rape is not just a crime but also an impediment to a continued education—and to subsequent success in the workplace and public life. That means that Title IX’s protections are necessary for an individual student’s learning opportunities and for gender equality throughout American life. If sexual violence goes unaddressed at universities, women will face unconscionable obstacles to education, professional success and full citizenship. …
Many of those who say criminal law is the single best way to handle campus sexual assault believe that bringing in the cops is the only way to put a stop to gender-based violence at colleges. Yet the gravity of these harms cannot be understood through the lens of criminal law alone. If we are truly to take sexual violence seriously, we must, as Title IX does, acknowledge that rape and harassment serve to maintain a regime of inequality in which, decades into widespread coeducation, women still cannot learn and thrive as equals to their male classmates. Yes, rape is a horrible crime. But it is also part of systemic inequality in education that we still need to fight.
Ugh. On top of its illegality, moral bankruptcy, and utter uselessness, the torture program under the Cheney administration was a disaster for US foreign policy, providing grade-A propaganda fodder to our enemies and rivals, infecting our allies, and making it difficult for the US to be taken seriously as an advocate of human rights. The reactions to the Senate report from around the world make these depressing facts even more obvious. Here’s China, thumbing its nose at us:
State news agency Xinhua’s website dedicated a special page to coverage of the Senate report, titled: “How long can the US pretend to be a human rights champion?” A commentary carried by several mainland news portals, originally from the Beijing-backed Hong Kong newspaper Ta Kung Pao, said that while the excessive use of torture by the CIA had been widely known, the report showed some of the methods were “almost medieval”. Turning to the question of how its release would damage the social and constitutional values the US prides itself on, and whether it would cause the country’s moral high ground to erode more rapidly, the author said that in any case “so-called ‘human rights’ were merely a veil and the excuse to put pressure on others”. The report was a heavy blow to the credibility and global image of the US, it added.
Russia joins in:
“The information that has been publicized is yet another confirmation of gross and systemic human rights violations on the part of the American authorities. Despite the fact that this Inquisition-style torture was carried out by CIA agents outside U.S. territory, this does not exempt them from principal responsibility for such deliberate actions. Simultaneously, the question arises about the involvement in these crimes of the governments of those countries (their names have been prudently erased from the report) that agreed to host the secret prisons,”[said Konstantin Dolgov, Foreign Ministry Commissioner for Human Rights, Democracy, and the Rule of Law].
And jihadists are having a field day:
“Read [the Senate report] my brother and stick your shoe in the mouth of those who say that the Islamic State distorts Islam,” one Isis supporter tweeted. Another, a Syrian, wrote: “Getting beheaded is 100 times more humane, more dignified than what these filthy scumbags do to Muslims.” Hani al-Sibaei, a prominent radical Islamist scholar, commented: “American politicians consider CIA report on torture of Muslim detainees a disgrace to America! Damn you! Your entire history is a stain on the face of humanity.” Nabil Naim, a former Egyptian jihadi leader, announced that he was ready to raise a 10,000 strong force of suicide bombers to attack America. Isis itself issued no official response.
The torture apologists will spin this as proof that Dianne Feinstein is somehow giving aid and comfort to our enemies, but the fallacy at work here is so transparent as to barely merit a response. It was the architects of this program, not the people who brought its horrors to light, who handed this talking point to our enemies.
Then there’s the reaction from our allies and clients. Hanna Kozlowska reports on how officials in Poland, which hosted one of the CIA’s black sites, is responding to the news of just how dirty their hands are:
The report, which US president Barack Obama and Polish prime minister Ewa Kopacz discussed ahead of its release, put Poland’s involvement back in the spotlight. At yesterday’s press conference, former president [Aleksander] Kwaśniewski conceded that the US had asked for a “quiet site” where they could “obtain information” from cooperative suspects. But neither he nor then-prime minister Leszek Miller, also at the press conference, said they were aware of the harshness of the interrogations. …
Among the new, alarming details revealed by the report is that the US offered Poland payment for its role in the CIA program after the detention site was up and running. According to the report, the CIA offered Poland an undisclosed sum and refused to sign an agreement with Poland outlining the CIA’s role and responsibilities at the site. Polish officials said at yesterday’s press conference that the memorandum included demands to guarantee humane treatment of the prisoners. “What country will respect us if it turns out that our authorities will agree to anything for several million dollars, even if it is against the Polish constitution?” Polish member of parliament Łukasz Gibała wrote on his Facebook page.
Poland was not the only European country complicit in the torture regime. Natalie Nougayrède wonders whether these countries will own up to it:
European countries failed to conduct effective investigations into the agencies and officials who facilitated the CIA’s work. Sweden is the only country to have paid compensation to victims of extraordinary renditions. Italy is the only country where officials have been convicted by a national court for their involvement in the CIA programme.
According to information compiled by Open Society Foundations, at least 54 governments cooperated with these CIA activities. Twenty-one of those are European, of which 17 were at the time members – or soon to become members – of the European Union. In addition to the countries above, the list of European states that were complicit in CIA rendition flights and other unlawful activities includes Lithuania (there are strong indications that this country also had a “black site”), the UK, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Austria, the Czech Republic, Greece, Cyprus, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Albania.
While Canada’s Stephen Harper bragged that his country had nothing to do with the torture program, some Canadian intel experts say otherwise:
“It gives us a good conscience” to be able to deny participation in torture, but “it doesn’t take away the fact that we’re as guilty as them,” says Michel Juneau-Katsuya, a former senior intelligence officer with CSIS, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. As Juneau-Katsuya sees it, Canada’s spy agencies have a tremendously close relationship with the CIA and probably had a pretty good idea how the intelligence was generated. Adds security expert Wesley Wark, “When Prime Minister Harper says it’s an American problem with an American issue with no Canadian ramifications, that’s not really accurate – or oversimplified on any number of fronts. We tapped that intelligence. We relied on that.”
In Afghanistan, where our abuse of detainees is coming under additional scrutiny from the ICC, President Ashraf Ghani didn’t mince words:
“This is a vicious cycle. When a person is tortured in an inhumane way, the reaction will be inhumane,” Ghani told a specially convened news conference in Kabul. “There can be no justification for these kinds of actions and inhumane torture in today’s world.” His announcement was a reminder of how the impact of a programme that was shut down in 2008 is still felt in Afghanistan – and how news of abusive detention still fuels anger. In part this is because it spawned a wider culture of abuse among other US security forces stationed in the country, human rights activists say, with reports of torture and extrajudicial killings by special forces as recently as last year.
Egypt’s government has remained tight-lipped, but the official line is leaking out:
Those who did react said the report highlighted the hypocrisy of the US, who have often condemned Egypt’s recent human rights abuses. “America cannot demand human rights reports from other countries when this proves they know nothing about human rights,” said a pro-regime television host, Tamer Amin, on his show.
However, not everyone was quick to denounce the torture program. The French far-right superstar and Putin admirer Marine Le Pen had this to say:
The rising leader of the Front National (FN) party said that she “did not condemn” the use of torture when questioning terror suspects, in an interview with BFMTV. “Of course [torture] can be used,” she said. “It’s been used throughout history.”
“I believe that the people responsible for getting information out of terror suspects that can save civilian lives do a responsible job,” she added. “There are times, such as if a bomb is about to go off, when it is useful to get a suspect to talk…by any means.” However, she later backtracked saying on Twitter that her words had been “misinterpreted”[.]
Unlikely that endorsement will be appearing in the CIA’s PR packet anytime soon.
The Dish 