Although some people dispute this, when the sun comes up in the morning, it is sometimes described as a sunrise. In other news, when you torture someone to death, it is sometimes described as torture. This is the insight of The Hill‘s Mario Trujillo, who managed to get the following published without spontaneously combusting:
A forthcoming report on the defunct CIA enhanced interrogation program “tells a story of which no American is proud,” according to leaked State Department talking points.
The White House on Wednesday accidentally emailed The Associated Press the proposed “topline messages” the department prepared in anticipation of the declassification of the Senate Intelligence Committee report.
The executive summary of the committee’s report on the Bush-era techniques — sometimes described as torture — is expected to be declassified in the next few weeks.
The CIA’s use of torture is not the end of the story. People were murdered:
The American Civil Liberties Union today made public an analysis of new and previously released autopsy and death reports of detainees held in U.S. facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom died while being interrogated. The documents show that detainees were hooded, gagged, strangled, beaten with blunt objects, subjected to sleep deprivation and to hot and cold environmental conditions.
“”There is no question that U.S. interrogations have resulted in deaths,”” said Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director of the ACLU. “”High-ranking officials who knew about the torture and sat on their hands and those who created and endorsed these policies must be held accountable. America must stop putting its head in the sand and deal with the torture scandal that has rocked our military.””
We’ve buried this information so deeply that our reporters can’t even begin to call it murder. They can’t even call it torture. It is “sometimes described” that way, but, you know, opinions differ.
The past isn’t even the past:
As World Condemns Attack on Gaza, US Resupplies Isreal with Weapons.
Those weapons are inflicting torture on the people of Gaza. It’s just that we don’t include industrialized torture in the definition of torture.
My father was a veteran of WW2 and served 4 years in a Japanese prison of war camp. He was always proud of the fact that the USA would not treat prisoners of war the way he was treated. I am glad that he passed away before all of this happened for he would of been ashamed of the USA and rightly so.
Odd thing though he always said a sure sign that the USA was in trouble was if we went into the Middle East. Having served over there prior to WW2. He use to tell of the atrocities that he saw perpetrated by different sects. He always believed that trying to help people who exist to hate each other was a way to destruction for any outside country.
My father too was a POW, though in German camps which were more humane (relatively). He lived until 2004 just before the election. His was a visceral despair for American torture (on top of the Cheney/Bush 9/11 cruel, prejudiced and self-serving reaction) during those last years was hard to watch.
accidentally emailed?
Seriously?
You know what I’m going to say. Since 1963. It’s been a bad dream and no one wants to wake up.
A tale of two coups; Dallas and Watergate like bookends to a decade in which warring factions within the intelligence establishment battled for the privilege of ‘serving’ the nation.
That they ultimately served it as dinner to the plutocracy is the predictable but cruel irony.
You know what I’m going to say. Since 1963. It’s been a bad dream and no one wants to wake up.
Everybody knows what the CIA is and does. It’s hard to blame anyone for trying to be delicate about it.
We’re all scared of them and fifty years of thought about what to do about it have brought us nothing.
Yes, but as details of government duplicity, malfeasance, corruption are revealed, we must find them surprising/shocking and enraging enough that we demand corrective action now. (Have only once in my life seen such a public response and that was in 1974 when Nixon resigned and ordinary Republicans absorbed the reality of who Nixon was and what he’d done. And they didn’t blame Democrats for the investigations into Watergate.) Otherwise we risk becoming like those Duncan Black spoke of today:
Nonconstructive cynics.
You’d lose access! To all these high government officials! Imagine trying to report on the workings of government if you couldn’t talk directly to the murderers and torturers so you can brag to your friends and families about the “access” you enjoy. Also, who’s going to invite you to the cocktail parties if you go around calling murderers and torturers a bunch of murderers and torturers? They throw the bestest ones; everyone knows that.
What I probably like the most about this is when I say I’m ashamed of the United States because of crimes against humanity like this, there are the stone-brains who immediately demand to know why I’m pissing on their purple mountain majesties and fruited plains.
Then there’s the everyday ordinary torture in our criminal “justice” system. WRT the FBI lab, Charlie Pierce tells it like it is in Evidently Incompetent Or Worse
From the WAPO report:
From Charlie:
A forthcoming report on the defunct CIA enhanced interrogation program “tells a story of which no American is proud,”
Well, except the Cheney family.
And preventing this honesty is why the CIA was spying on the US Senate Committee on Intelligence, which is supposed to have oversight over the CIA and prevent it from running amok.
The due diligence of Senators in this situation is so lacking that people are questioning why vote when the CIA runs the country. This is a very dangerous political situation. Expediency will make it much worse.
The sad fact is that the Snowden/Greenwald stories on the NSA have had two and only two long term impacts on American politics:
-) Whistle blowers are now afraid to come forward with information about government wrong doing, for after all the tales of alleged surveillance capabilities they are paranoid about being tracked and arrested.
-) When an ugly story breaks about the CIA and torture, ordinary people who are tired of the relentless bickering dismiss everything as “just those NSA paranoics going at it again.”
It’s a sad commentary on the body politic.
Really? That’s where your head went? Jesus, man.