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'Tortured Some Folks'
Obama's Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough, acting for Obama, played a central role, backing the CIA's position at every turn. The fact that the White House chief of staff would personally oversee the negotiations between the committee and the CIA spoke to the gravity of the issue.
Military Police officer Charles Graner poses over Manadel al-Jamadi's corpse, after he was tortured to death by U.S. soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison.
On August 1, 2014, Obama entered the White House briefing room: "We tortured some folks," he memorably said. But he added: "It's important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job those folks [at the CIA] had."
And so the timid President who, to great fanfare, announced the end of torture (and the closing of Guantanamo, which never happened) ended up making excuses for "those folks" at the CIA, and doing all he could to prevent the American people from learning the particulars of what they had done.
In the end, Sen. Feinstein, with strong help from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, prevailed over Brennan and his lawyerly team of McDonough/ Obama. The sanitized Executive Summary of the report was released on Dec. 9, 2014 just before Congress went home for Christmas.
I suspect that, in the end, Feinstein and Reid confronted Obama with a kind of "nuclear option": Release the Executive Summary or Sen. Mark Udall (who had just lost his Senate seat and had little to lose) would read it from the Senate floor.
That may be the last time anyone in Washington prevailed over the Deep State.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. He was a CIA analyst for 27 years. In early March 2006 he returned the Intelligence Commendation Medallion given him at retirement, in order to dissociate himself from an agency engaged in torture.
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