The Obama Administration finally made semi-good on its promise of transparency surrounding CIA torture today, releasing (PDF) a 540-page redacted summary of the 6,000+ page torture report compiled by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Contrary to previous reports about the content, the summary does contain the word torture several times, mostly in reference to the Convention Against Torture, and to CIA arguments that what they were doing in violation of this was still worth it from their perspective.
Officials who opposed the release were long warning it would provoke a backlash if the world knew what the CIA did, and US embassies the world over are ratcheting up security for the reaction.
The Pentagon is also making preparations, putting thousands of Marines on high alert across the Middle East and Africa for potential operations that may be launched after the release.
The political battle-lines related to torture are already being drawn, with then-President George W. Bush making public his support for everything the CIA did back then, dubbing them “patriots” and insisting releasing a report was “way off base.”
Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D – CA) issued a statement on the release, while the Republican minority on the committee issued their own 167-page condemnation of the 540-page summary of the 6,000+ page report, which despite being unclassified, was itself subject to heavy redaction.
Analysts the world over are pouring over the summary today, and will doubtless have compelling insight into what it means. The first sites likely to break with such analysis are emptywheel.net and The Intercept. Other links will be added as they become available.
"Oh, so now they tell us." No, it's been known a long time, the perversion, cowardice and made-up terrorists designed to provoke new ones so we could stay where we weren't wanted and milk the oil and every bit of funny money that Iran Contra could only dream about. The monster fed on living humans and it grew to great size. Now some timid and tardy remarks are made in the Senate, and on NPR someone even talks about whether we are ready yet for "Truth and Reconciliaton". But truth isn't really going to happen.
This started me down a long road to understanding my country's worst tendencies. Some have been there from the present, some speak with a foreign accent.
But making it all better is impossible. I am fated to live out my life an alien in my own country. Now I know how a Palestinian feels. Unless of course, we can use the numbers to beat the elites who caused this. But I don't think the mental power is there. We are hardly what we were at our Revolution.
And many Americans talk ad infinitum about American values.
I know. Hypocrisy all around. Just look at this guy
http://buchanan.org/blog/pjb-the-case-for-torture…
CIA Director during Bush Adm.
”We don’t deny that our interrogation techniques made some terrorists uncomfortable for a time…”
It seems like the CIA was doing what they where fold to do and now they are leff holding the bag. If people want to reduce torture in the word they have to hold the politicians responsable first.
And so, from the Horn of Africa to St. Petersburg, from Cairo to Singapore, in nice apartments, dingy rooms and quiet nursing homes, grey-haired old men and women, the former apparatchicks of the NKVD, Gestapo, UDBA, SAVAK, are having the last laugh.
Now the Americans understand why the young Jewish boy had to have his skull crushed with a rifle butt, the black man's genitals burned with a cigarette or the Chinese peasant gang-raped– it was so we could protect our country. We knew it because our leaders told us so, . . . it was legal under our laws. We were only following orders– just as you Americans were only following orders, . . . .
Thank you America for finally vindicating us, by turning out to be so much like us, the unjustly reviled torturers of a hundred failed regimes, . . . .