Torture – Page 4

Will The Torture Report Be Buried After All?

This is an outrage:

Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials. Kerry was not going rogue — his call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning, could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad.

First, the Obama administration set up a white-wash, in the form of the Durham investigation; then they sat back as the CIA tried to sabotage the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence; then Obama’s chief of staff prevented the report’s publication for months, by insisting on redactions of the report to the point of it being near-unintelligible; and now, with mere days to go, the administration suddenly concludes that a factual accounting of this country’s descent into barbarism poses “an unacceptable risk” to US personnel abroad. Now, after this report has been stymied for two years; now, just days before its scheduled publication; now, because if the administration can prevent its publication this month, they know full well that the Republicans who will control the committee in January will bury the evidence of grotesque and widespread torture by the US for ever.

Of course this complicates relationships with foreign countries; of course it guts any remaining credibility on human rights the US has; of course the staggering brutality endorsed by the highest echelons in American government will inflame American enemies and provoke disbelief across the civilized world. But that’s not the fault of the report; it’s the fault of the torture regime and its architects, many of whom have continued to operate with total impunity under president Obama.

Make no mistake about it: if this report is buried, it will be this president who made that call, and this president who has allowed this vital and minimal piece of accountability to be slow-walked to death and burial, and backed the CIA every inch of the way. But notice also the way in which Kerry’s phone-call effectively cuts the report off at its knees. If it is released, Obama will be able to say he tried to stop it, and to prevent the purported damage to US interests and personnel abroad. He will have found a way to distance himself from the core task of releasing this essential accounting. And he will have ensured that the debate over it will be about whether the report is endangering Americans, just as the Republican talking points have spelled out, rather than a first step to come to terms with the appalling, devastating truth of what the American government has done.

I’m genuinely shocked by this last-minute attempt to bury the truth. Does anyone doubt that one agency in that inter-agency review is the CIA itself? And can anyone seriously believe that if this moment passes, we will ever know what happened? I have confidence in Senator Feinstein’s backbone on this. I wish I had confidence in the president’s.

So let me make one last appeal: Mr President, make the right call. Release the report. Let the facts be in the sunlight. It’s what you promised. And it’s the least this country deserves.

Update from a reader:

I think you may be interested in what Democratic Senator Mark Udall told Esquire in an interview conducted on November 21 and scheduled to run in the January 2015 issue. Esquire decided to release a portion of it today:

… obviously, if it’s not released, then I’m gonna use every power I have, because it’s too important. It’s too historic. And we can’t afford to repeat the mistakes to let this slide.

(Photo by Charles Ommanney/Getty Images)

The Other Torture Report

The International Criminal Court in The Hague is finally speaking up about our abuse of detainees in Afghanistan:

The prosecutor’s office concluded that “the information available suggests that between May 2003 and June 2004, members of the US military in Afghanistan used so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ against conflict-related detainees in an effort to improve the level of actionable intelligence obtained from interrogations.” (The report also considered whether certain raids and airstrikes by international forces constituted war crimes but concluded that there was no evidence of intentional harm to civilians.) Still, the prosecutor’s statements on U.S. detainee abuse mark the first time that the ICC, which the United States has not joined, has explicitly identified possible criminal behavior by U.S. nationals. …

The court remains a very long way from indictments of U.S. soldiers or civilian officials. The prosecutor still hasn’t decided to open a full investigation. Even if she does, indictments of U.S. personnel are highly uncertain. What appears to be happening behind the scenes is a quiet push and pull between The Hague and Washington over whether the United States has adequately investigated abuses by its own forces. If the United States can demonstrate that it has done so, the doctrine of “complementarity” should preclude any court action.

Ryan Vogel isn’t sure the ICC has valid grounds to investigate these abuses:

Whatever one’s views regarding U.S. detention policy in Afghanistan from 2003-2008, the alleged U.S. conduct is surely not what the world had in mind when it established the ICC to address “the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole.” The ICC was designed to end impunity for the most egregious and shocking breaches of the law, and it is hard to see how alleged detainee abuse by U.S. forces meets that standard.

But even if a case against U.S. forces for alleged detention-related abuses is not dismissed because it is insufficiently grave to meet the thresholds for the ICC to proceed, it also seems questionable for the ICC to pursue such a case for reasons of complementarity (i.e., the principle that the ICC is not to move forward when a State is genuinely able and willing to investigate and prosecute). The United States has one of the most developed and effective military justice systems in the world, which has the demonstrated ability and willingness to hold its own accountable for violations of the law, including any violations in the context of detention operations.

To which Kevin Jon Heller replies:

[The prosecutor’s office] is not interested in the low-level US soldiers who were the principal perpetrators of torture in Afghanistan; it is focusing instead on “those most responsible” for that torture. It is thus equally irrelevant that “there have not been many issues more thoroughly investigated by the military and U.S. Government in the past decade than that of detainee treatment.” The problem for the US going forward is that it has never made any genuine attempt to investigate, much less prosecute, the high-ranking military commanders or the important political officials who ordered and/or tolerated the commission of torture in Afghanistan. That is simply indisputable. So until such time as the US does — read: never — complementarity will not prevent the OTP from continuing its investigation into US actions.

Yes, Obama Is A Phony On Torture

The Obama administration, it is now beyond dispute, is in thrall to the CIA. The president, through his chief-of-staff, Denis McDonough, has been doing all he can to render the Senate Intelligence Committee Report on torture unintelligible, if he cannot prevent its publication entirely. And he is not giving an inch in his now two-years’ war against the transparency and accountability he once said he favored. Readers know I’ve almost given up on them, and am deeply concerned that next year, a Republican-run Senate will bury the report for ever. That’s clearly John Brennan’s strategy, as it has been from the start. It’s also, clearly, Obama’s.

I once saw Obama as a way out of our torture shame. If he was never going to investigate and prosecute, as is demanded of any signatory to Geneva, I never thought he would actively prevent even some small measure of accountability. How wrong I was.

Senator Rockefeller calls it like it is after yet another meeting with John Brennan’s best friend, Denis McDonough, a Catholic for some reason dedicated to ensuring that torturers not only face no punishment or reproach, but that their crimes are protected from public accountability for ever:

Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), who served as intelligence committee chair before Feinstein, was furious after the meeting, and accused the administration of deliberately stalling the report. “It’s being slow-walked to death. They’re doing everything they can not to release it,” Rockefeller told HuffPost. “It makes a lot of people who did really bad things look really bad, which is the only way not to repeat those mistakes in the future,” he continued. “The public has to know about it. They don’t want the public to know about it.”

As negotiations continue, Rockefeller said Democrats were thinking creatively about how to resolve the dispute. “We have ideas,” he said, adding that reading the report’s executive summary into the record on the Senate floor would probably meet with only limited success. “The question would be how much you could read before they grabbed you and hauled you off.”

In this game of brinksmanship, it’s clear that Obama is prepared to risk the burial of the entire report. The Senators therefore need to come up with a way to bypass him and the rogue agency he refuses to hold to account. If they can’t read the report into the Congressional Record, there must be another way. To leave this rogue agency with the knowledge that it can do anything, commit any crime, violate any treaty, spy on its overseers, and never even face a public accounting, let alone punishment, of its crimes, is an invitation for these lawless agents to do anything they want in the future. And under a pro-torture, pro-war, pro-secrecy future Republican administration, we can only begin to wonder what they will get away with next.

The Struggle For Accountability On Torture

A new story in the Huffington Post confirms what I’ve been fearing for a while now: that the Obama White House, in particular chief of staff Denis McDonough, is now pulling out all the stops to protect the CIA as far as humanly possible from any accountability over its torture program. If you want to know why the report has been stymied, and why something that was completed two years ago cannot even get the executive summary in front of the American people, the answer, I’m afraid, is the president.

You’d think his chief-of-staff would have better things to do right now than plead with Senators to protect and defend John Brennan, the CIA director who has put up a ferocious fight to avoid any accountability. But no:

During the last weeks of July, the intelligence community was bracing itself for the release of the Senate investigation’s executive summary, which is expected to be damning in its findings against the CIA. The report was due to be returned to the Senate panel after undergoing an extensive declassification review, and its public release seemed imminent.

Over the span of just a few days, McDonough, who makes infrequent trips down Pennsylvania Avenue, was a regular fixture, according to people with knowledge of his visits. Sources said he pleaded with key Senate figures not to go after CIA Director John Brennan in the expected furor that would follow the release of the report’s 500-page executive summary.

Weird, huh? What is at the heart of this Brennan-McDonough alliance? And then this staggering detail:

According to sources familiar with the CIA inspector general report that details the alleged abuses by agency officials, CIA agents impersonated Senate staffers in order to gain access to Senate communications and drafts of the Intelligence Committee investigation. These sources requested anonymity because the details of the agency’s inspector general report remain classified. “If people knew the details of what they actually did to hack into the Senate computers to go search for the torture document, jaws would drop. It’s straight out of a movie,” said one Senate source familiar with the document.

All of this is out of a really bad movie: CIA goons torturing prisoners with abandon, destroying evidence of war crimes, hacking into the Senate Committee’s computers, impersonating Senate staffers and on and on.

What really seems to have set off the alarm bells is what’s called the Panetta Report, an internal CIA review of its own torture program that somehow (almost certainly accidentally) got included in the document dump given to the Committee. That report is, by all accounts, damning about the torture program, especially its vaunted “effectiveness.” And you can see why Brennan panicked. How will the CIA attack the Senate report if its own report had come to the exact same conclusion? That’s what set off this drama – because Brennan knew at that point that the CIA was busted. Since then he and McDonough have done all they can to bury the truth, even as they are “debating” whether to allow a loophole for torture if conducted overseas.

What’s also disturbing is the weakness of the Democrats, with a few exceptions (thank God for Wyden and Udall). Feinstein seems to have retreated to her usual supine role, and there’s a sense that the political climate – with ISIS hysteria at epic levels – makes this kind of accountability politically toxic. You get a flavor of how the CIA will play this from this quote in the HuffPo piece:

“At a time when ISIS is on the march and beheading American journalists, some Democrats apparently think now is not the time to be advocating going soft on terrorists. The speculation I hear is that the Senate Democrats will wait until the elections are safely over,” said Robert Grenier, a veteran CIA officer who was the top counterterrorism official from 2004 to 2006.

No one is advocating “going soft” on terrorists. We’re advocating the rule of law and core adherence to the Geneva Conventions and a thorough review of war crimes under the last administration. Those are not weaknesses in a democracy’s fight against Jihadist terror. They are strengths. And they are not negotiable.

What I worry about is if the Republicans win the Senate next month, they could bury the report for good. I simply have to hope – remember that? – that the president means what he has always said, and that massive evidence of war crimes is not buried, even if no one in the CIA or the Bush administration will ever be held accountable for anything.

Release the report. And if it is so damning that Brennan has to go, that’s the price of democratic accountability. No one is indispensable. And no one should be somehow claiming in a democracy that they are.

(Image: A heavily redacted document from the CIA released in 2008)

Obama And Torture: Another Win For The CIA?

There have been posts I’ve written over the past decade and a half on this blog that have left me with a very heavy heart. Absorbing the full meaning of what was revealed at Abu Ghraib was one; reflecting on the horrifying child-abuse in the Catholic church was another; reacting to president Bush’s endorsement of a Federal Marriage Amendment or president Obama’s half-assed decision to re-fight the Iraq War one more time were not exactly easy posts to compose. I confess I find it hard to write dispassionately about these kinds of things. The abuse of children; the torture of prisoners; the madness of permanent warfare; and the citizenship and dignity of gay people: these are first order questions for me. I understand, as we all must, that politics is an inherently flawed, imperfect, deeply human and always compromised activity. But some things are not really open to compromise. And torture is one of them.

The mounting evidence that president Obama’s long game may well mean the entrenchment and legitimization of torture and abuse of prisoners is a deeply painful thing to report on. He’ll say otherwise; they’ll reach out and insist otherwise. But the record, alas, is getting clearer by the day. We have seen Obama’s rock-solid support for John Brennan’s campaign to prevent any accountability, even to the point of spying on the Senate Committee tasked with oversight, across his two terms. We have watched as the White House has refused to open up its own records for inspection, as it has allowed the CIA to obstruct, slow-walk and try to redact to meaninglessness the Senate Intelligence Committee’s still-stymied report on torture. Our jaws have dropped as the president has reduced one of the gravest crimes on the statute book to “we tortured some folks,” while doing lots of “good things” as well.

Now for the moment when the stomach lurches. The Obama administration is actually now debating whether the legal ban on torture by the CIA in black sites and brigs and gulags outside this country’s borders should be explicitly endorsed by the administration in its looming presentation before the UN’s Committee Against Torture (which might well be an interesting session, given the administration’s consistent refusal to enforce the Geneva Conventions).

One has to ask a simple question: what on earth is there to debate? Torture as well as cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment has already been banned by the executive order of the president, and it is not bound by any geographical limits. Here, moreover, is the text of the Detainee Treatment Act, pioneered by torture victim John McCain, making it even more explicit:

(a) No individual in the custody or under the physical control of the United States Government, regardless of nationality or physical location, shall be subject to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.

(b) Construction. Nothing in this section shall be construed to impose any geographical limitation on the applicability of the prohibition against cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment under this section.

Well: here is the explanation, as given by Charlie Savage in the NYT yesterday:

Military and intelligence lawyers are said to oppose accepting that the treaty imposes legal obligations on the United States’ actions abroad. They say they need more time to study whether it would have operational impacts. They have also raised concerns that current or future wartime detainees abroad might invoke the treaty to sue American officials with claims of torture, although courts have repeatedly thrown out lawsuits brought by detainees held as terrorism suspects.

The CIA’s lawyers want more time to study whether banning torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners in line with the law and Obama’s executive order would have “operational impacts”. But how could it when torture and mistreatment are hereby forever banned? Doesn’t it imply that the CIA still sees an option for restoring torture in the future, especially if a pro-torture Republican wins the presidency?

A strong case for this interpretation can be read here in a post by David Luban. It’s essential, if complex, legal reading for anyone concerned that Obama, by taking the CIA’s side in this debate and promoting and exonerating those implicated in past torture, has actually left open the real possibility of this darkness descending again.

Savage has tweeted in response that “operational impacts” could merely refer to conditions of confinement, or force-feeding, rather than to torture and abuse more broadly understood. But the question is still vague – and we know enough about the appalling record of the CIA in this matter to suspect that even the tiniest loophole in the anti-torture regime – like those dutifully carved by Yoo, Bybee et al. – can lead to more war crimes, whose very existence can be suppressed.

You can see the inherent danger here:

Bernadette Meehan, a National Security Council spokeswoman, said Mr. Obama’s opposition to torture and cruel interrogations anywhere in the world was clear, separate from the legal question of whether the United Nations treaty applies to American behavior overseas.

Say what? Is she really saying that all that matters is that Obama personally opposes torture, regardless of whether the law says so or not? Does the administration think we’re that easily placated? Does the president think that another empty rhetorical gesture to his base will suffice – even though his administration intends to be mealy-mouthed about torture in front of the UN Committee and leave a gaping loophole for the next president to exploit?

Presidents come and go; Congressional majorities go back and forth; but the CIA remains. Because this administration never even considered enforcing the Geneva Conventions on the US – by refusing to investigate and prosecute acts of torture and abuse by government officials under the previous administration – the CIA knows it can get away with war crimes in plain sight. Emboldened by that knowledge, and eager to prove that its previous actions were completely legit, it seeks now to find ways to cover up the record, and get the Obama administration to endorse a loophole for the perpetuation of torture, thus cementing a bipartisan protection of war criminals and of war crimes and prisoner abuse. It does all this for the future: so that it will never be held accountable by any body, domestic or international, and so that it can torture and abuse again, if it decides it’s in the country’s best interests. And only it will make that decision. We know by now it needs no other sanction – just some legal shenanigans to cover its own ass.

So we have a true test of what this president is made of, as the administration preps for its first appearance before the UN Committee. Is this president serious about torture? Or is he a pawn, like so many before him, of a rogue agency that is accountable to no one?

(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Obama And Torture: The Record Gets Worse

We are still, of course, waiting for the Senate Intelligence Committee Report to be released to the public. It’s been forever since it was finished, and forever since the CIA managed to respond, and the endless process goes on and on – even after John Brennan’s attempt to spy on the very committee supposed to oversee his out-of-control agency, and then lie about it. The very fact that Brennan is still in his job – after displaying utter contempt for the Constitution and the American people – tells you all you really need to know about where Obama really stands on this question. He stands for protecting the CIA – and Denis McDonough, his chief-of-staff, has become the CIA’s indispensable ally in enabling not only its immunity from any prosecution for war crimes, but from even basic democratic accountability.

So it does not, alas, surprise me to find this anecdote in Leon Panetta’s memoir:

The extent of the Obama’s fury over the [Senate Committee’s] study was revealed in a memoir by former CIA Director Leon Panetta that was released this month. The president, he wrote, was livid that the CIA agreed in 2009 to give the committee access to millions of the agency’s highly classified documents. “The president wants to know who the f— authorized this release to the committees,” Panetta recalled then-White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel shouting at him. “I have a president with his hair on fire and I want to know what the fuck you did to fuck this up so bad!”

We don’t have merely passive indifference to the CIA’s record on torture, we have active opposition to the entire inquiry from the very beginning of Obama’s term in office. If you want to know why we are still waiting for the report almost two years since it was finished, and if you want to know why the White House refused to provide mountains of internal documents that would have added to the report’s factual inquiries, just absorb the anecdote above. And if you want to know why the White House did nothing to discipline the CIA after it hacked into the Senate Committee’s own computers, ditto. It’s impossible not to conclude that Obama wants as little of this material made public as possible. His pledge for the most transparent administration in history ends, it seems, at Langley.

The question is: why? The answer, I’d wager, is pretty simple and deeply depressing. From the very beginning, Obama was told (and apparently believed) that if he attempted to investigate or cooperate in any inquiry into the CIA’s war crimes, he would “lose the agency,” as they say in Washington. It’s a curious phrase when you come to think about it: “lose the agency”. In what other branch of government would cooperating with a Congressional investigation into alleged misconduct risk “losing the agency”? There’s an implicit sense here that the CIA can and will retaliate against presidents who dare to hold it to account. And that kind of conventional wisdom is what led Emanuel and now McDonough to protect the CIA at nearly any cost.

The current battle – in which McDonough is apparently indistinguishable from John Brennan – is over the extent of the redactions in the report. They’re already voluminous, but the CIA is now asking for unprecedented concessions in order to make the report as hard to understand as possible and to render critical narratives impossible to follow. So, for example, they are objecting to the use of pseudonyms to identify individuals who crop up often in the report, alleging that they somehow risk agents’ lives.

But the pseudonyms in the report are not the pseudonyms that agents use to protect their actual identities; they are merely completely fictional names in order to clarify an individual’s role over time in the torture program. Without them it could become close to impossible to make sense of the torture narrative. In the past, moreover, all sorts of reports that have emerged from government inquiries – from the Church Committee to Iran-Contra – have used real names for some individuals, and pseudonyms for others, in laying out their conclusions. But not this time, apparently. And even from the CIA’s perspective, this battle makes little sense. If all identifying pseudonyms are turned into black spaces, it can lead to the impression that the agency as a whole was responsible for various war crimes, as opposed to pseudonymous individuals within it. Removing pseudonyms actually paints the entire CIA with a much broader and darker brush than it deserves – for there were many in the CIA appalled and shocked by the amateurish brutality of the program, and many who were integral to ending it.

Then there is an attempt to redact parts of the report that include the history of intelligence before the torture program was put into effect. The CIA wants this removed as irrelevant, but in the context of the report, it can be highly relevant. If, for example, it can be shown that a certain piece of intelligence was already known in the CIA before the torture program, and a torturer subsequently claimed it was discovered in a torture session, then it is highly relevant for that history to be known. For it proves that torture was not necessary and that many of the claims for its success were without key context and therefore deeply misleading.

Yesterday’s McClatchy story leads with the notion that the report does not follow the trail of responsibility up to Bush, Cheney, Tenet, Rumsfeld et al, and is thereby somehow toothless.

But the committee was an investigation specifically into the CIA’s records on the program, to get a full accounting of what happened within that agency. It was not tasked with the essentially political job of holding the White House responsible. And it may be, in fact, that even some of the most powerful individuals in the Bush administration were actually unaware of what was really going on, or that they were merely repeating what the CIA was telling them, and the CIA was lying to cover its ass. That does not minimize the political responsibility of president Bush and others for presiding over such a grotesque torture program; but it’s essential context for understanding what actually happened.

That’s what this Committee report is really about. It is not about assigning responsibility for torture. It is merely the legislative branch’s completely legitimate inquiry into how on earth a democratic society could have sunk so low so fast in the war on Jihadist terrorism. It is the beginning of that process of truth and accountability, not its end. But even that minimal task of fact-finding has been stymied, obstructed and foiled by the CIA from the very beginning. And in that process, the president has been one of the CIA’s strongest defenders and enablers.

In no way does that mean that Obama bears the responsibility for this hideous stain on this country’s integrity and values. It does mean, however, that we have a government agency that is effectively beyond any democratic accountability – even when it commits war crimes. Something is rotten in this national security state. And it is our duty to expose it – and do what we can to make it better.

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

Obama Is Now Covering Up Alleged Torture, Ctd

But not any more:

A Federal District Court judge on Friday ordered the public disclosure of 28 classified military videotapes showing the forced cell extraction and forced feeding of a hunger-striking Guantánamo Bay detainee, rejecting the Obama administration’s arguments that making the videos public would endanger national security. The New York Times and 15 other news organizations had petitioned to unseal the videos. In a 28-page opinion, Judge Gladys Kessler of the United States Court for the District of Columbia cited the First Amendment in overriding the government’s arguments for keeping them secret, most of which, she said, were “unacceptably vague, speculative,” lacking specificity or “just plain implausible.”

In order to judge whether the government is engaged in a form of torture, it’s essential that we see what it is doing to prisoners. Words are not enough. If the photos from Abu Ghraib had never been released, we would have only the euphemisms of “long-time standing” or “stress positions” to understand the brutality and inhumanity involved. And we know why the CIA destroyed the video evidence of its brutal torture of José Padilla (an American citizen) or Khaled Sheikh Muhammed (one of the masterminds of 9/11). They would have shocked the conscience and made the reassurances of our highest officials that the United States has not committed offenses usually associated with dictatorships transparently false.

There are credible claims that the kind of force-feeding inflicted on prisoners goes beyond medical needs to brutality. Here’s part of what is alleged:

At Gitmo, they began to use tubes that were too big for Hassan’s nostrils. Rather than leaving them in place, they would insert and remove them twice a day. Prisoners were force-fed in what Hassan called “the Torture Chair.” Hands, legs, waist, shoulders and head were strapped down tightly. The men were also force-fed constipation drugs, causing them to defecate on themselves as they sat in the chair being fed. “People with hemorrhoids would leave blood on the chair and the linens would not always be changed before the next feeding.” They’d be strapped down amid the shit and blood for up to two hours at a time–though quicker wasn’t always better.

There are claims that this agony was on display to deter others from hunger-striking. It seems to me particularly important for a president committed to ending torture to prove that he isn’t continuing it – even if it is for the sake of keeping someone alive. For my part, I see suicide by hunger strike to be a perfectly rational response to the Kafkaesque vortex these men are in – and a violation of their core human dignity to prevent them from seeking the only way out of their nightmare that Gitmo can give them.

Lots of previous Dish debate on force-feeding here. The above photo is from a series of government photos from the Gitmo hunger strike.

We Tortured. It Was Wrong. Never Mind.

I’ve wondered for quite a while what Barack Obama thinks about torture. We now know a little more:

Even before I came into office I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 we did some things that were wrong. We did a whole lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values.

I understand why it happened. I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.

But having said all that, we did some things that were wrong. And that’s what that report reflects. And that’s the reason why, after I took office, one of the first things I did was to ban some of the extraordinary interrogation techniques that are the subject of that report.

And my hope is, is that this report reminds us once again that the character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard. And when we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line. And that needs to be — that needs to be understood and accepted. And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.

What to make of this?

I don’t think it’s that big a deal that he used the English language to describe what was done, in any fair-minded person’s judgment. He’s said that before now. And his general position hasn’t changed. Let me paraphrase: We tortured. It was wrong. Never mind. So he tells the most basic version of the truth – that the US government authorized and conducted war crimes – and hedges it with an important caveat: We must understand the terribly fearful circumstances in which this evil was authorized. But equally, he argues that the caveat does not excuse the crime: “the character of our country has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard.”

This latter point is integral to the laws against torture – but completely guts his first point. As I noted with the UN Convention, the prohibition is absolute:

No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.

Cheney, Bush, Tenet, and Rumsfeld all knew this from the get-go. That’s why they got their supine OLC to provide specious justifications for the legally prohibited. That’s why they won’t use the word “torture,” instead inventing an Orwellian euphemism. And, of course, the president’s excuse for them – that “in the immediate aftermath of 9/11,” we did wrong things – is deeply misleading. This went on for years across every theater of combat. What about what Abu Ghraib revealed about the scope of torture in the battlefield much later on? What about 2005 when they secretly re-booted the torture program? This was a carefully orchestrated criminal conspiracy at the heart of the government by people who knew full well they were breaking the law. It cannot be legally or morally excused by any contingency. It cannot be treated as if all we require is an apology they will never provide.

Yet that’s what the president’s acts – as opposed to his words – imply. And that’s what unsettles me. It is not as if the entire country has come to the conclusion that these war crimes must never happen again. The GOP ran a pro-torture candidate in 2012; they may well run a pro-torture candidate in 2016. This evil – which destroys the truth as surely as it destroys the human soul – is still with us. And all Obama recommends for trying to prevent it happening again is a wistful aspiration: “hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.” Hopefully?

Then there’s the not-so-small matter of the rule of law.

Call me crazy but I do not believe that the executive branch can simply allow heinous crimes to go unpunished just because they were committed … by the executive branch. It seems to me, to paraphrase the president on Friday, that the rule of law “has to be measured in part not by what we do when things are easy, but what we do when things are hard.” How many times does the United States government preach about international law and Western values? On what conceivable grounds can we do so when our own government can commit torture on a grand and brutal scale for years on end – and get away with it completely?

Either the rule of law applies to the CIA or it doesn’t. And it’s now absolutely clear that it doesn’t. The agency can lie to the public; it can spy on the Senate; it can destroy the evidence of its war crimes; it can lie to its superiors about its torture techniques; it can lie about the results of those techniques. No one will ever be held to account. It is inconceivable that the United States would take this permissive position on torture with any other country or regime. Inconceivable. And so the giant and massive hypocrisy of this country on core human rights is now exposed for good and all. The Bush administration set the precedent for the authorization of torture. The Obama administration has set the precedent for its complete impunity.

America has killed the Geneva Conventions just as surely as America made them.

(Photo: a page on enhanced interrogation techniques via a FOIA request.)

Why Hasn’t John Brennan Resigned?

I offer you a simple set of facts: under the Bush administration, the CIA set up a program that indisputably contained torture techniques; in due course, the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated the program in order to get some clarity as to its intent, its techniques, its authorization and its results; as the Committee was doing its work, the CIA hacked its computers in order to craft its own defense and suss out what the Committee had discovered. When Senator Feinstein publicly accused the CIA of this grotesque interference in its affairs, and assault on the constitutional separation of powers, the CIA chief, John Brennan said:

As far as the allegations of, you know, CIA hacking into, you know, Senate computers, nothing could be further from the truth. I mean, we wouldn’t do that. I mean, that’s—that’s just beyond the—you know, the scope of reason in terms of what we would do.

At the time I wrote: “Either Brennan or Feinstein isn’t telling the truth. ” We now know it was Brennan who wasn’t telling the truth, as the CIA itself has now acknowledged in its own internal report that it did exactly that – something “beyond the scope of reason”. Indeed it is beyond the scope of reason. It was also beyond the scope of reason that the CIA would import the torture and brain-washing techniques of Communist China in order to glean intelligence from captured enemy combatants. And yet they did that as well. But the attempt to obstruct justice by hacking into the Senate’s computers adds something else to the original crime. Let’s recall what DiFi said back in March:

Here’s her conclusion:

I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the speech and debate clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities or any other government function. … The CIA’s search may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act as well as Executive Order 120003, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.

This is not a minor matter – it is a hugely important matter in terms of the constitution and the rule of law. We’re talking here about crimes and deception. How are we supposed to believe another word that comes out of Brennan’s mouth? And how desperate must the CIA have been to cover up its crimes that it took this extraordinary step of spying on the Senate that oversees it?

I submit that either Brennan knew nothing of what was going on and had no grip on his own agency; or he knew full well and was brazenly lying in public. In either case, under his watch, the CIA tried to subvert a critical Congressional report on its own criminal history.

I’m with David Corn:

Brennan owes the nation an explanation for his own actions. Why did he put out a false cover story? Was he bamboozled by his own squad? Was he trying to stonewall?

The CIA conducts much of its business in secrecy; and most of Congress’ vetting of the CIA likewise occurs out of public view. Effective oversight requires trust and cooperation between the two—and there must be that trust and cooperation for the public to have confidence that the oversight system works. But there also has to be public trust in those who lead the CIA. Brennan’s initial public statements about this scandal severely undermine his credibility. He owes the public a full accounting. If he remains in the job, President Barack Obama will owe the public an explanation for why he retained an intelligence chief who misled the public about CIA misconduct.

(Photo: Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan takes questions from the audience after addressing the Council on Foreign Relations in in Washington, DC on March 11, 2014. Brennan denied accusations by U.S. senators who claim the CIA conducted unauthorized searches of computers used by Senate Select Committee on Intelligence staff members in an effort to learn how the committee gained access to the agency’s own 2009 internal review of its detention and interrogation program, undermining Congress oversight of the spy agency. By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images.)

John Brennan’s Latest Lie

The torture-defender and CIA loyalist insisted earlier this year that the CIA never deliberately hacked the Senate Intelligence Committee to undermine its vital report on war crimes under Bush and Cheney. Here’s what he said:

When the facts come out on this, I think a lot of people who are claiming that there has been this tremendous sort of spying and monitoring and hacking will be proved wrong.

Really? So here are the facts on this:

An internal investigation by the Central Intelligence Agency has found that its officers improperly penetrated a computer network used by the Senate Intelligence Committee in preparing its report on the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation program. In a statement issued Thursday morning, a C.I.A. spokesman said that agency’s inspector general had concluded that C.I.A. officers had acted inappropriately by gaining access to the computers. The statement said that John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director, had apologized to the two senior members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and that he would set up an internal accountability board to review the matter.

Brennan apologized this week to Senators. I doubt he will ever apologize to the American people.