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But the delicate "spirits" of the CIA work force are something that the Post never ceases to worry about. So Pincus and Warrick ran to some "ex-CIA officials" to gauge the morale damage that the torture disclosures had caused.
It turns out that many of these "ex-CIA officials," cited in the Post article, are folks with the most to lose if Attorney General Eric Holder starts unraveling the sordid tale of torture, assassination, kidnapping, you name it over which they had purview and in which they were involved.
The Post article was accompanied by a photo of A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard, who laments that "morale at the agency is down to minus 50." To their credit, I suppose, Pincus and Warrick do note that Krongard was the "third-ranking CIA official at the time of the use of harsh practices," but there is no specific statement that Krongard and other worriers about CIA morale just might have some huge self-interest in discouraging investigations.
Post readers are not alerted, for instance, to Krongard's history as the official who gave Blackwater, the ex-CIA-official-dominated firm sometimes called Assassination Inc., its initial contract, nor that he joined Blackwater's Board of Directors after retiring from the CIA. Nor that with the help of his brother, the State Department's Inspector General, he helped block congressional inquiries into alleged Blackwater illegalities.
Instead, the Post treats Krongard as a reliable source and the Obama administration's release of torture-related documents as a policy blunder.
"One former senior official said President Obama was warned in December that release of the Justice Department memos sanctioning harsh interrogation methods would create an uproar that could not be contained," the Post reported, quoting the official as saying:
"They [the White House] thought that it would be a two-day story; they were wrong."
"Warning" the President of the United States!Who's running this country, anyway?
Loving the Inquisition
In Saturday's front-page story, the Post was even more obvious about which side it was taking on the issue of torture and the efficacy of using brutal methods to extract information.
Warming the cockles of Dick Cheney's heart, the Washington Post was "confirming" that waterboarding and sleep deprivation worked -- just as we were told by Sen. Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, on May 13 at a hearing on detainee interrogation that included an implicit tip of the hat to all manner of infamous torture past:
"The Vice President [Cheney] is suggesting that there was good information obtained, and I'd like the committee to get that information. Let's have both sides of the story here. I mean, one of the reasons these techniques have survived for about 500 years is apparently they work."
Five hundred years takes us proudly back to the Spanish Inquisition when the cardinals at least had no problem calling a spade a spade. Their term for waterboarding was tortura del agua. No euphemism like "enhanced interrogation technique" or EIT, for short.
As for Cheney's earlier
claim that two CIA documents would prove that the EITs were effective -- the two
were released this week, and they prove nothing of the kind. Together with
others, they do indicate that detainees like KSM provided important
intelligence on al-Qaeda and its plans. But they fail to support the contention
that it was the use of harsh techniques (as opposed to traditional
interrogation methods) that yielded the information.
The Washington Independent's Spencer
Ackerman, who has been covering all this like a blanket, notes that the two
documents actually suggest that non-abusive interrogation techniques were
primarily responsible for eliciting the most important information cited in the
two documents.
In short, Cheney is no closer to proving that "torture works," than he was before the release of those two documents to which he gave so much fanfare. Indeed, given how the two fizzled out, he is now farther away from making that case, except in the eyes of senior editors at the Washington Post and other outlets of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM).
