Alex Constantine - April 10, 2014
April 9, 2014
More than a year after it approved a report critical of the CIA’s interrogation and detention policies, the Senate Intelligence Committee has voted to make a part of the document public. It’s now up to President Barack Obama to ensure that the agency doesn’t mount a rear-guard attempt to censor or sanitize the committee’s findings in the name of national security.
Thanks to news reports and a report by the CIA’s inspector general, Americans long have been aware of both the broad outlines and some abhorrent details of the Bush administration’s mistreatment of suspected terrorists after 9/11. We know that suspects were transported for questioning to “black sites” abroad, and that two suspected al-Qaida operatives, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaydah, were subjected to waterboarding. And we have read the memos in which Bush administration lawyers used contorted reasoning to justify torture.
But the Intelligence Committee’s 6,200-word report, based on a review of millions of pages of documents, contains additional accounts of abuse, including (according to a Washington Post report) the alleged repeated dunking of a terrorism suspect in tanks of ice water at a site in Afghanistan. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the Intelligence Committee chairwoman who aggressively has sought its declassification, said the report “exposes brutality that stands in stark contrast to our values as a nation.”
Of course, torture wouldn’t be justifiable, even if it “worked”; but if there is evidence that the use of inhumane methods was ineffective, as well as immoral, that constitutes another indictment of a policy former Vice President Dick Cheney described as operating on “the dark side.”
Last week, the committee voted to declassify the report’s 480-page executive summary along with 20 findings and conclusions, but that represents only the beginning of the disclosure process. The executive branch will now determine which portions of the document must be redacted to protect sensitive national security information.
The Central Intelligence Agency has promised that it will do its part to ensure that the declassification review proceeds “expeditiously.” That is why the president, who has sent mixed signals about the importance of confronting the abuses of the past, must make thorough and timely declassification of this report a personal priority.
– Los Angeles Times
http://www.morrisdailyherald.com/2014/04/09/another-view-time-to-expose-the-cias-dark-side/aoct84c/
