Due to other commitments, I haven’t been able to do much more than glance at the report that was issued today by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. But, from what I have already seen, it is enough to justify breaking the CIA into a thousand pieces and scattering it to the winds.
Also, the Director of Central Intelligence, John Brennan, pretty much has to resign, and I will keep making that point until he does. Everyday that he stands in defense of his agency making unsupportable statements that contradict the president’s own stated positions, he’s an embarrassment to the administration and the entire Executive Branch. He must go.
More later.
…the Director of Central Intelligence, John Brennan, has to resign, and I will keep making that point until he does.
enough to justify breaking the CIA into a thousand pieces
Careful. You know what happened to the last guy who said that.
I wasn’t surprised, because I expected to see what the report said (CIA lied, torture didn’t work, higher-ups made it happen) and I expected to be horrified by the details, which I was.
Meanwhile, Darrell Issa is grilling Jon Gruber and LeBron is meeting William and Katherine.
Sadly, I fear not many fucks will be given…
Oh no!!! Many fucks will be given.
Fake fucks.
Makeup fucks.
“Sorry, dear!!!” fucks.
Watch.
A head or two will roll…across the PermaGov room, through the revolving doors and into the so-called “private sector” intelligence system, of course.
Headlines will be made about “success.”
And then…after the next one or two hottest-thing-ever media scrums…it’ll be business as usual. I halfway expect that this whole current brouhaha is being used as a distraction while the spooks hook up kinder, gentler interrogation and information-gathering methods. Brain probes. high-level drug usages, better forms of hypnotism, drones the size of fruit flies and so on.
Only when the current economic imperialist system changes will there be anything substantive happening in terms of reform. Now it’s just finding a better rabbit punch while claiming that the other ones were “mistakes.”
Obama will bow out, graceful as ever, and a new frontman/frontwoman will bow in.
Only they won’t.
Bet on it.
AG
Give a pass to those that headed the CIA when these reported torture activities took place and all those that came later who covered it up? Not just no, but HELL NO!
George Tenet
Porter J Goss
Michael Hayden
Michael J Morrell
Leon Panetta
David Petraeus
John Brennan
It’s also way past time for accountability among senior military officers for the torture activities that they also ordered, approved, condoned, or engaged in. And none of this “I was following orders bs.” Didn’t work for Nazi war criminals and therefore, not a permissible defense for any US military senior official.
It is not “a permissible defense” for any US officials of any kind?
Why do you think that?
The winners write history and at the very least the U.S. hasn’t lost the war yet. Had Germany won W.W. II do you really think that there would have been war crimes trials being held in Nuremberg? Hell no!!! Not German war crimes, anyway. Maybe the people who firebombed Dresden and nuked Nagasaki/Hiroshima, but not Hitler’s boys.
Just what the U.S.spooks will say.
Bet on it.
AG
Why do I think that?
Because I grew up on an era when there was wide acceptance of that proposition. And I refuse to let cynicism for our devolution of some principles to rule me 24/7.
So did I. It was not true then and it is less true now. Is yours a morally imperative position? I believe that it is. But to expect that position to be supported by the very criminals who were responsible for its violation is naive to say the very least. We need a structural and political change of at least the magnitude of the New Deal to even begin to approach the concept of U.S. officials being held responsible for their actions. So far, I don’t see it happening. I wish that I did.
AG
Yes, a moral imperative. That’s what always precedes structural changes that correct unfairness, inequality, etc. What disgusting is that most people in this country were led to believe that there was a prohibition against torture (and dismissed voices from the left pointing out that the federal government engaged in torture as CT loonies). Not too different from what people outside the Bible Belt south were led to believe about African-American enfranchisement for a hundred years.
Good law shouldn’t require follow-up good laws to enforce the original good law that despicable people violate.
Except of course the law of what you can get away with.
Proof?
A clear signal from the current PermaGov/CIA paper of record, The Washingtoon/Amazon Post. (Emphases mine):
I repeat:
“…the two sides have largely compartmentalized their differences, giving the agency deep congressional backing on a range of covert programs.”
And there it is. A giant, foot-stomping intelligence community response. “No. We will not change. We will not be changed and aside from cosmetic effects, Congress has no intention whatsoever of messing with us. We are too big, too powerful, too rich and too important.”
Read the rest of the article. And then sit back and watch as the reform dumbshow unfolds for the rubes.
“America the Beautiful” my royal Irish ass!!!
“Omertica the Vast Criminal Conspiracy” is more like it.
Watch.
AG
Those of us who already possess the moral underpinnings which make us feel revulsion at the fact we tortured have known about these crimes for many years. So this report does nothing but”officially confirm” what was already known and admitted to be true, even by those who perpetrated the acts.
And for those who have had no remorse up to this point to the fact we tortured, the facts and evidence released here will never do anything to change their minds or convince them that it was morally and legally wrong. “Facts” are now simply considered a different point of view in this country. Like anything which challenges the conservative view of American exceptionalism or deigns to expose the rank hypocrisy and moral rot that has come to symbolize every crack and crevice of the American system, this report will be out of the major news cycle in very short order. And the vast majority of the nation will know little to nothing of the details. And they will not care. They simply will not care.
Jason Leopold obtained the diaries of Abu Zabaydeh and published them on Al Jazeera. Those can be cross-checked with what this report says about Zubaydah’s interrogation, which was likely the first and likely authorized post-hoc by the OLC memo.
All of the psychologists involved should be named and stripped of their professional credentials; the APA has lost a lot of credibility over its failure to investigate this earlier or to have strict ethical standards against complicity in torture.
John Kiriakou should be release from prison immediately and pardoned.
James Clapper and John Brennan should be swiftly indicted for perjury before Congress and contempt of Congress. Brennan’s statement this morning is clear insubordination unless the President agrees in a nod-nod, wink-wink way with Brennan’s position that the end justifies the means no matter how paltry are the results.
Every CIA agent who actively tortured should be arrested for war crimes and preventively detained for trial as a “safety precaution” since the CIA is so worried about their safety from retaliation.
The United States should recommit itself to the International Criminal Court and bring the ratification of that treaty before the Repubican Senate in January.
After the relevant CIA agents are in protective custody, the full investigative report and the Panetta Report should be released and the Taquba report on Abu Ghraib should be re-released. The Inspector General of DoD should be instructed to compile a similar report of DoD’s torture program, with similar procedures for the preventive detention of people involved in that program, excepting the few enlisted personnel (such as Lyndie England) already punished for their participation.
All of the correspondence related to these programs sent by President Bush and Vice-President Cheney should immediately be declassified by the National Archives and turned over to both researchers, the DOJ, and the UN Security Council. And the United States should announce in advance that it will not veto a referral to the International Criminal Court. After all, the people referred do have the opportunity to present their defense. And some heads of state have been acquitted.
Finally, we need to start the debate about why the sweeping changes to national security institutions made in 1947 and after have costs tens of trillions of dollars and have not made us safer than we were at the end of World War II.
A wonderful list of action items that a responsible democracy should pursue. Enough said…
But aren’t you forgetting the lawyers? Like Yoo and the joker who was rewarded with the seat on the 9th Circuit? This whole Bushco torture fest (it seems to me) was utterly dependent on getting the OLC lawyers to immunize the proposed crimes as “not torture”, a get-out-of-jail-free card. Without that, the whole torture scheme likely grinds to a halt. The CIA torturers demanded their piece of paper as the payment for their (obvious) crimes—even if some of the crimes had already been committed. Those tendentious intellectually dishonest “memos” were the crucial umbrella for the whole “conservative” operation.
Some very strange characters stepped up in Watergate and other scandals. Perpetuating a corrupt system eventually causes that corrupt system to collapse abruptly and often violently. There are some actors in government smart enough to know that and act on it at the appropriate time in order to forestall chaos.
Am I expecting those to happen? No. But if someone comes back with “what do you demand happen, smartass”, unlike the false characterization of Occupy Wall Street, I have a little list. And I am quite willing to set it to some music from the Mikado.
and I want a pony, and my weight in gold.
all of those are great ideas. do you honestly think any will happen? if so, want to wager on it?
Then let’s declare December 9, 2014, the day that the US Constitution officially expired.
I’d prefer a working democracy in peace and prosperity to a pony, thank you. A pony wouldn’t even last long as a meal in a general societal collapse.
Too many people are getting comfortable and resigned to their emerging Kafkaesque future.
After you hear the words “rectal feeding” just let it sink in that Bush, Cheney, and Tenet were trying to figure ways to disappear people. And that mindset still exists with the sick fucks in the CIA and military who carried out the orders to torture and got pretty inventive and creative in doing it. Or was creativity the job of the Dr. Mengele-type psychologists who were paid $81 million to design “enhanced interrogation” based on the theory of “learned helplessness”.
I don’t know whether the cynics are right or not. At the moment their bets are winning as the GOP members of Congress fall over each other trying to be sicker fucks than the CIA torturers.
thanks, Tarheel. imo the cynicism is just another version of “I’ve got mine, F you.”
and, in the same vein, take a look at the demonstrators all over last week. can we let those ppl down? of course, it’s more fun to type cynical comments from one’s parents’ basement.
You make me wonder who one gets to competently run the CIA. But then, I guess that gets back to the idea of “breaking it into a thousand pieces and scattering it to the winds.”
And stomp on those pieces to preclude them from growing again.
At a minimum, this CIA officer should be outed, arrested, and prosecuted for using waterboarding without CIA headquarters authorization.
CIA’s chief of interrogations
Resignations sure, but Obama would basically have to throw himself under the bus to go after war crimes, having used the same justifications for drones strikes on his 3rd day in office and having killed an American without due process. Sad.
I think they did it to show how tough they were. Such manly men.
US hypocrisy continues unless report is followed by prosecution of individuals and holding people in Washington DC accountable. This won’t happen, not now and not ever.
Alberto Gonzalez on definition of torture: organ failure or death, all else is permissable.
From Jay S. Bybee, Assistent Attorney General (August 1, 2002)
Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President
Re: Standards of Conduct for Interrogationunder 18 U.S. C. §§ 2340-2340A
The “Global Terrorism Index”, published annually by the Institute for Economics and Peace, reported last week that fatalities due to terrorism have risen fivefold in the 13 years since the 9/11 attacks, despite the US-led “war on terror” that has spent $4.4 trillion on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and anti-terrorist operations elsewhere. But it’s not really “despite” those wars. It’s largely because of them.
○ A Global Network for CIA torture: countries that hosted black prisons
Interestingly, the Bush admin called the service members who were caught in the cross hairs of Abu Ghraib ‘rougue’ and prosecuted them.
That very prosecution should lay the framework precedent for holding the CIA accountable.
And as for the NYT idea of Obama granting a pardon to the inner circle. Not until hell freezes over.
Just got mail …
Interesting to note that Americans travelling abroad no longer ask one another disingenuously, “Why do they hate us?” At least now they know.
They hate us because of our freedoms… to torture whomever we want without having to worry about legal prosecution.
A commenter at Balloon Juice mentioned the following, “David Gergen said we should not have released the report because of ‘Ferguson and all the race stuff.'”“
Wow. He’s connecting some highly inflammatory dots there, is Mr Gergen. Is he suggesting we tortured and abused jihadis, fellow travellers and innocents because they were non-white? I have to admit that explains a lot; but it also makes me nauseous.
A Freudian slip or evidence of lowered inhibitions either from drugs or an early stage of senility.
It hadn’t occurred to me before but I think he is on to something. Much of America’s destructive activity is only explainable in the context of our “original sin.”
That original sin included both slavery and the frontier, each acting to stabilize and empower the minority powers that be. The Ferguson PD is in the direct lineage of the Missouri slave patrols. The torture of brown people for their oil is no different a frontier action than the torture of red people for their land, a practice best symbolized by the proof of torture–redskins.
Then wow, we really should do something about it ‘cuz it’s making us crazy.
From Charlie, The Torture Report, Part Three: What Will Happen Now
Today, Senator Feinstein made a hasty retreat to her longtime comfy box as a Nat Security apologist.
Is she that stupid? Or does she assume that most USians are gullible and/or stupid enough not to notice that she has culpability in the in the Bush crimes.
I wonder why we’re so hesitant to make the most obvious of logical conclusions.
“Everyday that he stands in defense of his agency making unsupportable statements that contradict the president’s own stated positions, he’s an embarrassment to the administration and the entire Executive Branch.”
His hiring, and the effort Obama went to in keeping Brennan close, contradicts the President’s stated positions.
From page 9…
“The Committee did not have access to approximately 9,400 CIA documents related to the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program that were withheld by the White House pending a determination and claim of executive privilege. The Committee requested access to these documents over several years, including in writing on January 3, 2013, May 22, 2013, and December 19, 2013. The Committee received no response from the White House. ”
Today, December 10, is International Human Rights Day. It is a day to remember and read the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The United States is a signatory.
No way for USians to care about human rights when their paychecks or livelihood is dependent on the MIC, Nat. Sec and criminal injustice system.
While still disproportionately white and male, particularly at higher rank, Active Duty military personnel are also disproportionately Black or African-American. Yes, we all know why that is — but still doesn’t change the fact that when given a choice between jobs and human rights, jobs win.