CIA TORTURE REPORT: A SAD EVENT IN THE NATION’S HISTORY

 

…Diane Feinstein (D-CA), Current Chairperson of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence after the release of the CIA report.

 

The executive summary of the 6,600 page report on CIA enhanced interrogations had to be released.

The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence voted 11 to 3 last week to declassify and make public the executive summary and the findings and conclusions of its report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. 

 

Contrary to recent allegations from the opposition, the final report was not written to support preconceived notions. It was written to document the actual facts of the CIA’s detention and interrogation practices.  It offers nothing more, and nothing less.

The sordid episode sponsored by the nation’s CIA, demanded a call for national accountability, which is what the committee report has provided. Democratic nations, like individuals, cannot move on from traumatic moments without taking stock of their own behavior.

The critics’ of releasing the report, (mostly those Republicans that after the 9/11 attacks, had turned their heads when the Bush administration began their “enhanced” interrogations, now commonly called “torture”).  The two most common refrains from these individuals are that the report's items were “cherry-picked” and written to support a predetermined outcome.  They also tried to say that the report is flawed because of a lack of personnel interviews.

Both of these assertions are totally false and can easily be refuted, but first it is important to understand the origins of the committee’s study.

The full committee was not briefed on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program until September 2006.  That was more than four years after the interrogation program had secretly begun after the 9/11 attacks.

But it wasn’t until December 2007, when it was finally revealed to the committee that the CIA had destroyed videotapes depicting the interrogations of its first two detainees, Abu Zubaida and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The CIA had destroyed those tapes back in 2005, even over the objections of President George W. Bush’s White House legal counsel and the then director of national intelligence. 

And just why were those tapes destroyed?

The general story goes that the tapes were so gruesome that it was later decided by the CIA leadership that it was a better idea to just describe the interrogations than to show the disgusting interrogations in a highly questionable video.  A video that would obviously go viral on the internet and could be used by radical Muslims for recruiting purposes.

The criticism that the committee staff did not conduct personnel interviews is also highly misleading.

The reason being that in August 2009, just five months after the committee had authorized its CIA study, the US Justice Department broadened the CIA program from the destruction of the videotapes to a complete investigation of the CIA interrogations.  This meant that CIA officers and any White House staff whom the committee might have interviewed now faced potential Federal legal jeopardy.  This led the then CIA Director, Leon Panetta, to decide not to compel agency or White House personnel to participate in any interviews.

It was this Justice Department review, not just political partisanship, that later led Republicans on the intelligence committee to then withdraw from the study.  These individuals knew that their participation in the program would be reviewed and that they could be subjected to serious criticism and possible legal repercussions for their involvement in such a heinous program.  Some say that these past participants could also be singled-out and they, and/or their family members, could be violently targeted by the same enemy groups whose detained members might have been interrogated.

The size of the final report is a whopping 6,600-pages and contains CIA documents, cables, internal memoranda and e-mails, briefing materials, various interview transcripts, classified testimony, financial documents and more. Now that the report’s 600 page executive summary is released, the public is seeing how egregious and thoroughly documented and fact-based the report actually is.

In a true democracy, it is important that all the actions of the government, especially the military, CIA, and its secret actions, have oversight by the responsible Senate or House committees. 

 

But the Republicans in the US Congress were asking that the report not be published as it could cause our troops and embassies on foreign soil to be attacked by religious extremists.  In other words, the Republicans would rather forego the congressional responsibility for the American public, and the world, to see what the US government has been up to, and how it has been going against the nation’s values.

It is very important in regards to our values that our “dirty laundry” be put out for viewing so that hopefully, it will teach us as to what not to do in the future.  By not making the report public, we would basically be saying, “Oh, it’s OK, go ahead and do that again if you think you need to.”

It was a big mistake for the CIA to engage in torture…..excuse me, in “enhanced interrogations”….and as a democratic nation, we are now having to pay the price for these past indiscretions.

Ultimately, the Senate intelligence committee’s report should only be judged on the accuracy of its findings and the quality of its conclusions. 

Now, the American people will be able to judge this for themselves. I am personally convinced that they will conclude that the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program was a mistake that it must never be repeated.

Copyright, G.Ater  2014