Harsh truthon CIA torture finally revealed
As painful and dangerous as it is, the Senate Intelligence Committee led by Dianne Feinstein of California took the correct and necessary step in releasing the report on the CIA’s use of torture.
Now, we must not look away from the worst aspects of this report until we are certain that the abuses have stopped. If we don’t see torture for what it is – unacceptable and un-American – then we lose our grasp on the values we hold most dear.
Yes, hindsight is 20-20, and yes we were all terrified after 9/11. And we recall how fear became anger then the desire for revenge.
But torture is not revenge. It’s something far worse. While the broad outlines were already known, the specifics made public Tuesday put a sharper point on what went wrong after 9/11.
The report shows that inhumane treatment was more widespread and far more brutal than what the CIA told the White House, Congress and the public. If top intelligence officials didn’t flat-out lie, they certainly withheld key details. The justification was that “enhanced interrogation techniques” – bureaucratic jargon for illegal actions – were necessary to find those who attacked us and to thwart future terrorist acts. The CIA continues to claim these interrogations produced essential information, citing 20 such cases.
They have to live with themselves.
We must live with the knowledge that more detainees were waterboarded than we were told. One was chained to a concrete floor and likely froze to death. Many were subjected to nonstop brutal treatment for days or weeks – deprived of sleep, kept in darkness, and given medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” and hydration. By any reasonable standard, it was torture.
Senate Intelligence staffers looked at each of those cases and concluded that torturing detainees produced little, if any, vital intelligence not available from other sources. Torture never defused an imminent threat.
There was little training for interrogators, and some had a prior history of abuse. The agency didn’t adequately review the interrogation program’s effectiveness, and it doesn’t appear it looked at its own history, which showed that torture didn’t work.
That it wasn’t effective is beside the point. If, as a society, we condone this kind of treatment of even our darkest enemies then we become what we abhor.
Predictably, CIA and Bush administration officials have begun a media campaign to sow public doubt and shield themselves. They issued loud warnings that merely releasing the report would lead to terrorist attacks. That hasn’t happened. Most of the Muslim world already knew the truth, just not the details.
From the Senate floor, Feinstein and Republican John McCain of Arizona gave convincing rebuttals to the apologists and fearmongers. Both pointed out that there will always be instability and danger in the world, and terrorists don’t need an excuse for violence.
McCain speaks with particular weight, having withstood torture as a prisoner during the Vietnam War; we trust his voice more than any other. He praised Feinstein and others on the Intelligence Committee for their persistence in getting this report before the public – despite stonewalling by the Bush and Obama administrations and over-the-top criticism from Congressional Republicans.
We probably will never know all the abuses. The report is actually a 500-page redacted executive summary of a still-classified 6,700-page report. More than five years and $40 million in the making, it is based on a review of more than 6 million pages of internal CIA documents.
While releasing this report won’t remove the stain on America’s values, it will ultimately strengthen our standing in the world. We must come to terms with what the CIA did in our names – even if no one is prosecuted. Then we must ensure that doesn’t happen again.
“Our enemies act without conscience,” McCain said. “We must not.”
This story was originally published December 10, 2014 at 10:00 PM with the headline "Harsh truthon CIA torture finally revealed."