Senator Dianne Feinstein on Senate floor yesterday commenting on report of CIA torture
Well, well, well. The Senate Intelligence Committee "finally" got around to releasing a nearly six year study of the CIA's role in using "enhanced interrogation" techniques-torture-of terrorism suspects "between 2002 and 2008 that led to false confessions, fabricated information and produced no useful intelligence about imminent terrorist attacks". [1]
It's a 500 page executive "summary" by Committee Democrats-the full report more than 6,700 pages long remains classified and wasn't released. Also no Republicans participated in the study although they issued a 167 page rebuttal after the Democrats released the study they concluded "the CIA routinely provided extensive inaccurate information to Congress and the White House about its coercive interrogations" and "was far more brutal than the CIA acknowledged."
No kidding; to anyone paying attention the past 12 years or so knows full well the CIA committed torture at Guantanamo, the black site prisons it ran-the report cites Poland, Romania, Lithuania, Afghanistan, and Thailand-and whatever information it did get quaintly known as "actionable intelligence" was simply a tale made up by those being tortured to get it to stop.
The Committee-miraculously it seems-discovered the Justice Department issued memos giving "legal" cover to the "enhanced interrogation techniques concluding they didn't violate federal anti-torture laws.
So it appears this report was released at this time because the Senate Democrats are still in the majority until January when the Republicans retain the majority and in all likelihood they'd have prevented the report from being released.
The real travesty in this whole torture scenario isn't revealing the CIA committed torture but those who authorized it have never been held accountable in a real investigation.
That should have been done in 2009 after Barack Obama was inaugurated. Instead the entire Bush gang got a pass by the new president with him saying he wanted to "move on and not look back".
So this new Senate report is just a crock, with Senator Dianne Feinstein chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee fulminating, "Under any common meaning of the term, detainees were tortured" and its "one of the lowest points in our history". Yes it is Dianne yet this from the woman who sees nothing wrong with the NSA scooping up electronic communications of everyone in the world including all Americans and who in May had a fit of pique when on the Senate floor she accused the CIA may have violated the Constitution by hacking into Intelligence Committee computers.
So again unless there is a real investigation exposing and holding accountable those who authorized torture, a Senate report like this will cause a stir from the talking heads in the corporate MSM but will soon gather dust on a shelf and as usual nothing will be done.
Hey, this is America; it's par for the course.
Military non-coms got prosecuted when videos revealed they committed torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2004 but not so the top officials in the Bush administration that authorized the practice.
Let's see, lying to Congress is supposed to be a federal offense but James Clapper, head of the Office of National Security and former NSA director Keith Alexander both lied directly to Congress they said the NSA doesn't spy on Americans-which the Snowden revelations made absolutely clear and unmistakable. Of course neither man was fired or held accountable.
In America if you're a young, black or brown man, you're profiled, often rousted or arrested and sometimes killed by our increasingly militarized police even when you've done nothing illegal.
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