I agree with the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on torture should be promptly declassified. I also agree that the CIA has a conflict of interest in carrying out that declassification, and that the president should intervene to assure that the Executive Branch doesn’t try to whitewash the damaging information contained in the report.
There has to be a better way to handle declassification of reports that are focused on bad behavior by the intelligence community than having the intelligence community handle the declassification. At a minimum, a different agency should be in charge. Let the Director of National Intelligence handle it, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the NSA, or the National Security Council. Any group but the CIA.
I also want to know what were supposed to do with this report once we learn of its contents in detail. Are we supposed to do nothing? Isn’t the problem here that we have the legislative branch detailing serious crimes and yet no one is going to be held legally accountable for those crimes. This idea that the main point of creating this report is to dissuade future leaders from resorting to torture seems to be undermined by the fact that the torturers got away with their torture.
Look, I understand why the Obama administration didn’t come into office during a financial crisis and set up Nuremberg Trials to deal with their predecessors. But there’s a huge cost to not defining what the Bush/Cheney regime did as illegal and punishable by significant jail time. It corrodes our moral authority very, very badly.
When Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine and basically annexes Crimea, and when he gives a green light to harass gays and lesbians, we have the problem that we invaded Iraq and tortured the crap out of a lot of Iraqis. We have a little Gitmo problem. We have the waterboarding. There’s a whole legacy of shit that we have to eat over and over and over again, forever, because those maniacs are walking free.
Airing our dirty laundry on this again with a Senate report isn’t really going to do squat to fix this problem if no one goes to jail.
The true dirty laundry is that a large number of citizens find the torture of brown people of differing religion laudable.
Maybe.
But they still sound like lunatics to me.
Lunatics? Pre-enlightenment humans I’d say.
At some point the statute of limitations kicks in, if it hasn’t already done so. And at this point in our national decline, we’re likely lucky if we are even formally apprised of the past crimes of our officials.
The American “conservative” movement declares that water-boarding and assaulting prisoners isn’t really torture—but they also think torturing (assumed) bad guys is a sign of national “strength”. And they long have thought keeping the filthy laundry hidden in the stinky hamper is a sign of “strength” (and patriotism).
Unfortunately, the actual strength of a nation is almost always in inverse proportion to the political strength of its Rightwing nationalist movements….the political success of the American “conservative” movement is the surest indicator of our decline.
There’s a statute of limitations for this? Got a link confirming that?
Yes, there is. More like a statue of limitations, really.
SuperPrez ain’t gonna do it. He hasn’t yet and he will not.
Why? How? Because he made promises to the PermaGov…promises that I will bet HRC refused to make, hence her lousy image in the PermaGov media during the last part of the nomination fight.
The right pissed her off when they Monica-ed her husband. Bet on it. She had some axes to grind. Maybe she still does. Wouldn’t that be special!!!
Anyway…there it is, seabe. They are not going to jail and the so-called “disclosures” that come out will only be sops to the public…kinda like the “We’ll rein in the NSA!!!” speech O’Bomber made after the Snowden thing started to gnaw on his already weak approval numbers. Redacted to the max. Predacted, even. Bet on that as well.
So it goes tn the United Stasis of Omertica.
So it goes.
No snitching.
It could be your ass.
Chelsea Manning knows.
Broken O’Bomber’s mama didn’t raise no self-destructive fools. That’s another good bet…on plentiful evidence. He’s not gonna do much. He’s got a ex-preznidential career to run. The next White House caretaker? Doubtful. Either promises will be extracted or poll numbers will suddenly mysteriously start to plummet while the images in the press begin to look a little…strange.
Watch.
So it goes.
Later…
AG
Arthur, it’s a rare day when I’m more cynical than you are. So here we are.
You think HRC didn’t – or wouldn’t – make the same promises, or worse, to the intelligence “community”? The woman who is so concerned about the rights of the voiceless that her nickname on the Senate Armed Services Committee was “Madame Yes”? The woman who, as SoS, had all the leverage she could have wanted to convince various Middle Eastern despots, er, allies – like her close friends, the Mubaraks – to accept innocent Guantanamo prisoners? Yep, she left no stone unturned on that one.
An HRC presidency would be many things, but better on civil liberties or an accountable MIC isn’t one of them. Not by a long shot.
Bet on it.
Could be.
Could also be that the controllers simply didn’t want someone in the White House who knew where the real levers of power resided, how they worked and where the bodies were buried. Obama was the substitute tomato can. Two tomato cans can run as well as one, don’tcha know.
However, I got a real, personal sense of outrage from HRC when she made that “vast right-wing conspiracy” statement after Monicagate.
That’s my take on it, anyway.
That and a dollar three-eighty will get me a subway ride into Bloomberg Central from the Bronx.
So it goes.
AG
Sorry, seabe, my comment is wrong–there apparently is no limitations period for the federal torture statute and torturers can be tried as long as they live. But I thought Holder had previously made clear he wasn’t going to be prosecuting any CIA operatives for torture because they relied on legal opinions as to “legality”. But Booman is correct, they could still be held accountable, sorry for the error.
The limitations period for Bushco’s (admitted) violation(s) of FISA has almost certainly run without prosecutions…
Every law enforcement agency I know of brings in investigators from a different agency to investigate when it’s their own people suspected of wrongdoing. This is standard practice. Sure, you have the problem of law enforcement officials sympathetic to other law enforcement officials, but at least it’s not their friends, colleagues, and/or subordinates leading the investigation.
Why should it be any different with declassification? The difference, I suspect, is cultural. Cops are sworn to uphold the law (however poorly they sometimes do it, which is a separate issue). Spies lie and keep things secret as basic tools of their trade. Integrity is for losers – or, in the case of people like Bradley Manning, national pariahs.
That’s the problem, and as such, I’m not sure that I’d trust the DIA or NSA or whomever to do a much better job. The White House and/or the legislative branch need to make the call on issues like this. At least they have some (theoretical) accountability to the public, and every ounce of their professional training doesn’t scream to keep it all buried.
Really?
Not what happened in the killing of Ibragim Todashev
And put the FBI on Boo’s list of parties that should not be allowed to do the investigation.
The DemocRat and RatPublican parties, too.
Just sayin”…
ASF
I think you and I would be a good choice to conduct an investigation.
I was referring to criminal investigations. Internal reviews – which are standard in any agency when a firearm is discharged during duty – are notorious whitewashes, among local departments even more than at the FBI. In this case, another agency – namely, the Senate Intelligence Committee – is already involved, so criminal investigations, usually prompted by a prosecutor’s office, seemed more analgous. The SIC can, if it chooses, insist on an outside agency doing the declassifying. At least in theory, they are supposed to be overseeing the CIA, not the other way around.
I’m sure that there are more than a few Souix (and Cherokee, and Iroquois, and…and…and…) who find this notion rather humorous…
I dunno, Oscar.
More like this, I think.
AG
Too bad he is actually a child of Sicilian immigrants pretending to be an native american.
Espera Oscar de Corti
Oh.
Never knew that.
AG
Hmm. Putting aside the moral imperative and thinking about this purely from the political horse race perspective, the way a
sociopathwriter at Politico might, an attempt to prosecute based on the Senate report might have some very interesting effects on turnout for the midterms.It would also, I think, guarantee that Jeb is the next GOP candidate for president.