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The problem for America comes when we put it all together:
We reëlected George Bush knowing that he had approved of waterboarding and torture. We have accepted President Obama’s contention that we should look forward, not backward, thereby absolving those who committed war crimes of any accountability. Criminal prosecutions are both unlikely and unnecessary, but some form of official accountability is essential. This report is a start, but as a polity we have not lived up to our own responsibility, to demand accountability for the wrongs done in our name. …DavidCole,NewYorker
It’s not as though you can take the revelations of a few months, set them aside, and say, “but America is still basically a decent, honorable nation.” Nor should we ever, ever again, tolerate that labored excuse about a “few bad apples.”
This time it’s not about our law enforcement. It’s about the collusion of our military, our intelligence agencies, and their civilian bosses — the leaders we chose to represent us — in particularly horrendous forms of deceit and inhumanity.
Given the intensity and breadth of media coverage, I don’t even see a way to excuse any of us. We all knew. And when it comes down to blame, the focus narrows on George W. Bush and his vice president — the standout law breakers. David Cole clarifies the role of the post-9/11 “deciders” and the extent of their lies. Let’s just start with their knowledge that torture doesn’t produce results.
Before the September 11th terrorist attacks, the C.I.A. understood that torture and other coercive interrogation methods “do not produce intelligence and will probably result in false answers,” and have “proven to be ineffective.” After 9/11, however, the agency almost immediately began concocting theories to justify the use of such tactics. …Cole,NewYorker
And then we need to deal with what we have condoned. Condoned? Some of us even cheer the torturers, convinced that we remain innocent of our crimes because we are somehow special and that torture — in spite of all evidence — is a magic charm that will keep us “safe.” We still believe that although we know that we aren’t safe even from our own police.
… The summary of a report released Tuesday of the Senate investigation of these operations, even after being sanitized by the Central Intelligence Agency itself, is a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend and even harder to stomach.
The report raises again, with renewed power, the question of why no one has ever been held accountable for these seeming crimes — not the top officials who set them in motion, the lower-level officials who committed the torture, or those who covered it up, including by destroying videotapes of the abuse and by trying to block the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of their acts. …NYT
The brutality gets very personal: what men (for the most part) force on one another, calling it “behavior control.”
Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi citizen who allegedly masterminded the bombing of the USS Cole, launched a hunger strike that resulted in the CIA force-feeding him rectally, the report stated. Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the professed architect of the 9/11 attacks, also was subjected to rectal rehydration with no documented medical need, the report said. An interrogation official later said the measure demonstrated his “total control over the detainee.”
Another detainee who apparently underwent the procedure was Majid Khan, a Pakistani citizen and former suburban Baltimore resident, who pleaded guilty in 2012 to five war crimes, including murder, attempted murder and spying. He was held by the CIA overseas for three years before being transferred to the military facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The report said Khan was subjected to “involuntary rectal feeding and rectal rehydration,” which included two bottles of Ensure. Later that day, his “lunch tray,” consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts and raisins, was pureed and “rectally infused.”
CIA medical officers discussed rectal rehydration as a form of behavior control, according to the report… WaPo
Even as the Senate report would appear to be a death knell for — if not the entire CIA — those elements that relied on inhuman practices in order to get “intelligence” that turned out to have been useless — it seems nothing will change.
… The cycle of investigations has coincided with an era of dramatic expansion of authority and resources for the agency. Much of that CIA windfall has gone directly to the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, the entity that ran the secret prisons and interrogation program. …
… Even in recent months as tensions over the interrogation report mounted, U.S. officials said, senior CIA officers who were involved in the discredited interrogation program routinely took part in classified briefings on Capitol Hill where they were congratulated on their counterterrorism work.
In all previous CIA scandals before Sept. 11, 2001, the agency tended, for some time, to keep a lower profile after its public censuring. That is unlikely to happen this time. The criticism over interrogations has gone on for years and is occurring while the pace of foreign operations has grown ever more demanding, most recently with the rise of the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.
“Intelligence agencies have been whipsawed non-stop for 13 years,” said Stanford University professor Amy Zegart, an expert on the intelligence community. “The new reality is that intelligence officials are working in a perpetual state of crisis while being asked to confront the most complex threat environment in history.” …WaPo
We knew. We know. We just seem unable to grasp the extent to which we — not “they” — have created “the most complex threat environment in history.”
Worst of all, we know that we haven’t closed the door on torture, even now. As the Washington Post analysis points out, we do the “shame” thing periodically, but in the end, when we put it all together, we elect representatives who always want more, not less, power. The CIA has that power.
… The agency is expected to emerge from the investigatory rubble with its role and power in Washington largely intact.
Indeed, the CIA is in many ways at a position of unmatched power. Its budgets have been swollen by billions of dollars in counterterrorism expenditures. Its workforce has surged. Its overseas presence has expanded. And its arsenal now includes systems, including a fleet of armed drones, that would have made prior generations of CIA leaders gasp.
In part, that is because despite the deep fissures between the CIA and the Senate panel that issued the excoriating interrogation report, the two sides have largely compartmentalized their differences, giving the agency deep congressional backing on a range of covert programs. …WaPo
In the end, there’s no way we can avoid — as individuals and as Americans — responsibility for crimes that go way beyond military overreach or excusable panic generated by 9/11. 9/11, for all its ferocity and inhumanity, isn’t anywhere near the forms of atrocity America has indulged in for decades, and that it continues to defend.
This recent cycle of torture has been dealt with and, undoubtedly, the next round is either about to begin again or remains — at least — an available choice for America in its imperial struggles.
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Andrew Sullivan has an apt roundup of his experience watching the torture report as it emerged from the Senate yesterday, and particularly descriptions of “harsh interrogation”.
All I want you to do is imagine if you were witnessing this scene in a movie. The interrogators would be Nazis, wouldn’t they? And now they are us.
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For those on the right still defending this legacy, can we at least expect some remorse for the utterly innocent people tortured and even tortured to death? Or are these people incapable of even that? Have they really no decency left at all?
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The Chinese make a good point about America’s preachings on human rights abuses. They just write us off as blazing hypocrites.
Cross-posted from Prairie Weather
graphic via shutterstock.com
