In anticipation of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence releasing their report on the torture committed by the CIA during the Bush-Cheney years, the State Department is increasing security at some of our facilities overseas. My question for you, is this: if someone gets killed as result of this report being released, whose fault is that?
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
Primary fault: the felon Dick Cheney, the initial advocate of all (known) lawbreaking by Bushco.
Secondary fault: the CIA, its leaders and agents for happily agreeing to undertake the (obviously) illegal torture and then working diligently to cover it up.
Incidental fault: representative democracy, which in theory demands that the people (however uncaring ignorant and ultimately useless) be informed of the actions (especially illegalities) taken in their name by their elected officials and gub’mint.
Why would someone get killed because of the release of a report on US torture? The victims, their families, and compatriots already know about it; only USians are ignorant.
Although I suppose some domestic rightwing jerkwad could use it as an excuse — but they have already have so many imaginary grievances that this one wouldn’t be any more real.
Americans know more than you think, many aren’t bothered.
Anyhow I am taking the question as rhetorical.
You mean like these informed and intelligent Americans were in September 2003, Poll: 70% believe Saddam, 9-11 link?
Or are we to believe that Americans have gotten smarter and wiser as they’ve gotten poorer in the past decade?
Whose fault?
In reality or on Fox?
Most certainly fewer if the U.S. Congress investigation and report had been released five years earlier. Torture, rendition, Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Bagram, collateral damage U.S. airstrikes and drone attacks have caused an increase in recruitment of thiusands of jihadists. Have anyone read about IS [formerly ISIS] in the Levant: Lebanon. Syria, and Iraq. A direct consequence of the ill-fated invasion and occupation approved by U.S. Congress before the mid-term election of 2002. The backlash will cause tens of thousands of deaths for decades to come.
Where the buck stops [White House under Bush and Obama] and the torture perpetrators are reponsible for deaths, not anyone providing transparency and a chance for these acts not to happen (for awhile) again.
Who’s fault?
SATSQ:
Obama’s.
This ends today’s episode of SATSQ.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s dul… EXCITING edition, of SATSQ!
“if someone gets killed as result of this report being released, whose fault is that?”
Is this a trick question? The person that does the killing, I’d think.
Unless the report is so massive that a stack of paper topples over and crushes Dick Cheney but that would be too much to ask for in this post-ironic age.
Too easy: the unindicted War Criminals of the Cheney administration.
Every American citizen that did not contact their representative and complain and send a message to the Whit House as well. Telling them all you cannot go forwards without first clearing out the trash of the past.
Dick Cheney’s
And Harry Truman and his Congress for creating a institution that lacked accountability and was allowed to hamstring American foreign policy with stupid decisions.
to even ask that question is to accept the bogus frame that this stuff needs to be kept secret because national security.
My diary May 24, 2013 …
What do you expect from an honest-to-goodness terrorist sympathizer like Pete King?
Seriously, it is, of course the people who ordered torture to be carried out and the people who followed those orders. We sorted this kind of shit out at Nuremberg.
These are not the people who will be blamed, however.
As always, it will be The Dirty Smelly Hippies’ fault.
As driftglass says: “The Left, taking shit for being right since before you were born”
And we take the shit dumped on us without acting like the whiny-assed baggers/CPAC libos who get their fee-fees hurt when called out for being wrong again.
Dick Cheny – first, last, always!
Not Dick Cheney’s. Or Dubya, or Alberto Gonzales or John Yoo or any of our other war criminals (last decade’s edition).
Not any of the intel operatives who followed orders, sometimes with great enthusiasm.
Not Congress, for its abject failure to adequately oversee our intelligence agencies, as an institution or as individual elected officials.
Not Obama, either for allowing the release of the report or for allowing it to be so heavily redacted by the CIA itself.
And not “the terrorists” who, by existing, made the war on terror “necessary”; nor their Saudi financiers; nor the earlier generation of US intelligence operatives that trained and armed the Afghan muhajideen that then became blah blah blah.
All of these parties are guilty of plenty of crimes, but not that one.
For any death that happens as a result of the report’s release, the responsibility lies with the killers and with any other people who ordered it. Period.
Of course, if the US government itself took that principle seriously, we’d be prosecuting a lot of American intel officers, and more than a few former and current US officials, starting with Bush and Cheney. But we don’t take that principle seriously, so idiotic questions like this will be bandied about for the rest of the month by our chattering classes.
If the US government took the notion of assigning fault for acts of murder seriously, this report would not have been necessary in the first place.