The Torture Games

The Senate Intelligence Committee's Report on Torture has been published in paperback, though it is apparently a 549 page executive summary--the documentation running into the many thousands of (heavily censored) pages.  An excellent summary and commentary on the Report--what it does and doesn't say and do--can be found at the New York Review of Books in an interview with Mark Danner, who knows the topic from having covered it for some time.

Even given the tenor of the initial coverage of the report's findings--chiefly that the torture imposed by the CIA was even worse than previously known, and that despite CIA and GOPer claims it resulted in no important information--Danner highlights even more hair-raising contexts.  For instance, that torture was a first resort, done without any real planning or investigation into precedent and results, and that the prime suspect involved gave lots of good information before he was tortured, and none during or after.  Here's Danner:

"What I think is strictly speaking new is, first, how amateurish the torture program was. It was really amateur hour, beginning with the techniques themselves, which were devised and run by a couple of retired Air Force psychologists who were hired by the CIA and put in charge though they had never conducted an interrogation before. They had no expertise in terrorism or counterterrorism, had never interrogated al-Qaeda members or anyone else for that matter. When it came to actually working with detained terrorists and suspected terrorists they were essentially without any relevant experience. Eventually, the CIA paid them more than $80 million.

The second revelation is the degree to which the CIA claimed great results, and did so mendaciously. Sometimes the attacks they said they had prevented were not serious in the first place. Sometimes the information that actually might have led to averting attacks came not from the enhanced interrogation techniques but from other traditional forms of interrogation or other information entirely. But what the report methodically demonstrates is that the claims about having obtained essential, lifesaving intelligence thanks to these techniques that had been repeated for years and years and years are simply not true. And the case is devastating."

It remains a puzzle to me--as it does to Danner--why the Obama administration hasn't pursued prosecutions, or even why the President kept this report at arms length.  The Senate report itself doesn't include recommendations for any actions. Danner suggests it's melancholy evidence of the power of the CIA.

Another fact I didn't know: the Senate committee got the votes to conduct the investigation only when Democrats agreed to limit it to the CIA, and to stay away from the Bush executive department.  Even so, while the FBI comes off pretty well in this report, and the Justice Department not as badly as it might have, the fingerprints of Dick Cheney and G.W. Bush and their minions are all over this.

As Danner says, without prosecutions that involve judicial decisions, all that prevents the US engaging in torture again is President Obama's executive order, which can easily be disregarded by a future presidency.

Meanwhile, it appears that US police have taken more than surplus military weaponry from the so-called war on terror. The depravity unleashed by torture and other abrogation of rights justified by the Bushites has come to the United States, perhaps in racial attitudes, but specifically (according to one report) in the adoption of police state tactics and familiar CIA "black sites" but for American citizens in at least one major U.S. city.

The only positive in this is the fact that the Senate committee did investigate, and that after all the roadblocks thrown in their path by the CIA and allies, it has actually been published.  We'd all like to forget this happened, that our leaders could be this cowardly and depraved, or that people who did it are still politically powerful.  But what we'd better remember is that it could easily happen again.