A Time for Change

A report from the Senate Armed Sevices Committee was released last night shows that there was very little thought given to the use of torture by the Bush Administration and Congressional leaders on the Intelligence Committee.  You can see the report here. It is a fascinating read on many levels, although I have only had time to skim the over 200 pages.  According to the New York Times:

“In a series of high-level meetings in 2002, without a single dissent from cabinet members or lawmakers, the United States for the first time officially embraced the brutal methods of interrogation it had always condemned.

This extraordinary consensus was possible, an examination by The New York Times shows, largely because no one involved — not the top two C.I.A. officials who were pushing the program, not the senior aides to President George W. Bush, not the leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees — investigated the gruesome origins of the techniques they were approving with little debate.

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.

Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

The top officials he briefed did not learn that waterboarding had been prosecuted by the United States in war-crimes trials after World War II and was a well-documented favorite of despotic governments since the Spanish Inquisition; one waterboard used under Pol Pot was even on display at the genocide museum in Cambodia.

They did not know that some veteran trainers from the SERE program itself had warned in internal memorandums that, morality aside, the methods were ineffective. Nor were most of the officials aware that the former military psychologist who played a central role in persuading C.I.A. officials to use the harsh methods had never conducted a real interrogation, or that the Justice Department lawyer most responsible for declaring the methods legal had idiosyncratic ideas that even the Bush Justice Department would later renounce.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Today, asked how it happened, Bush administration officials are finger-pointing. Some blame the C.I.A., while some former agency officials blame the Justice Department or the White House.

The New York Times goes on to tell the story of how the CIA went about being “informed” on the use of torture and the pathetic way in which that was handled.

The Washington Post writes that “By late 2001, counterterrorism officials were becoming frustrated by the paucity of useful leads coming from interrogations — a meager showing that was linked, according to one Army major, to interrogators’ insistence on “establishing a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq,” the report said.”  So we were using torture to try to prop up th Bush agenda and the lie that he told us to invade Iraq?  I feel ill.

The report also discusses the torture of Abu Zubaida, who was captured at a time when there was a significant amount of chatter similar to that prior to 9/11.  He was transferred to a “secret CIA prison” in Thailand for interrogation because he was allegedly “withholding information regarding ‘terrorist networks in the United States” and “plans to conduct attacks within the United States or against our interests overseas.’”  While the CIA asked  Justice whether the use  of  ”additional” “extreme methods,” i.e., torture, would violate the prohibition against torture, the CIA “used borderline” torture anyway prior to receiving the advice.  ”No substantive plots were disrupted as a result of information provided during Abu Zubaida’s interrogation, according to current and former counterterrorism officials.”

After years of torture we have not captured Osama bin laden or many of the other top level terrorists.  We have altered our standing in the world because we can no longer credibly chastise other countries for the manner in which they treat prisoners.  What galls me is that there was such a hysterical reaction to the aftermath of 9/11.  The Bush administration pushed forward with its bizarre agenda yes, but what about Congressional leaders?  Why were they not jumping up and down and shouting “no, no, no” then?  

Ladies and gentlemen , let me introduce you to the members of the Senate ”Intelligence” Committee who were among the many people who let us down:

2001-2002
Democrats		Republicans
	Bob Graham,     Florida Chairman		Richard C. Shelby,    Alabama Vice Chairman
	Carl Levin, Michigan		Jon Kyl, Arizona
	John D. Rockefeller IV,West Virginia		James M. Inhofe, Oklahoma
	Dianne Feinstein,California		Orrin G. Hatch, Utah
	Ron Wyden, Oregon		Pat Roberts, Kansas
	Richard Durbin, Illinois		Mike DeWine, Ohio
	Evan Bayh, Indiana		Fred Thompson, Tennessee
	John Edwards,     North Carolina		Richard G. Lugar, Indiana
	Barbara A. Mikulski,Maryland
Thomas A. Daschle, South Dakota Ex Officio
Trent Lott, Mississippi Ex Officio

2001
Republicans		Democrats
	Richard C. Shelby,Alabama    Chairman		Bob Graham, Florida    Vice Chairman
	Jon Kyl, Arizona		Carl Levin, Michigan
	James M. Inhofe,Oklahoma		John D. Rockefeller IV,     West Virginia
	Orrin G. Hatch, Utah		Dianne Feinstein, California
	Pat Roberts , Kansas		Ron Wyden, Oregon
	Mike DeWine, Ohio		Richard Durbin, Illinois
	Fred Thompson, Tennessee		Evan Bayh, Indiana
	Richard G. Lugar, Indiana		John Edwards, North Carolina
Trent Lott, Mississippi, Ex Officio
Thomas A. Daschle , South Dakota, Ex Officio

 

It should be no surprise that Senator Feinstein is one of the Senators now calling for investigations. Is she planning on questioning herself?  Many of these  men and women are very good Senators, including Richard Lugar, Carl Levin, Bob Graham and Dick Durbin, but something was terribly wrong when they failed to serve as a check and balance to the hysteria and the evil agenda of the Bush administration in the aftermath of 9/11. 

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