Yes, the United States Tortures

This is one of those stories where the government tries to mitigate the righteous wrath of any person who pretends a belief in morality, or even effectiveness, by attenuating the release of the shocking facts so that the War Criminals responsible for these horrific actions can dismiss them as “old news”.

I hope your capacity for outrage and civilized sensibilities are never exhausted on this issue.

This weekend The Guardian is publishing a 3 part series on the Cover Up of our government’s active participation in actually, factually, and directly Torturing People.

It focuses on extensive interviews with Daniel Jones, formerly the chief investigator for the Senate Intelligence Committee’s inquiry. I’ll quote the preface today and probably by Monday I’ll have a consolidated reaction to it (I’m traveling Monday so I may not be able to post).

Senate investigator breaks silence about CIA’s ‘failed coverup’ of torture report
by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian
Friday 9 September 2016 13.21 EDT

The man at the center of the US Senate’s landmark investigation of the CIA torture program has gone public for the first time about an experience that led to the CIA spying on him as part of what he calls a “failed coverup”.

For six years, Daniel Jones was the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee’s inquiry into CIA detentions and interrogations carried out in the post-9/11 Bush era. Jones and his team turned 6.3m pages of internal CIA documents into a scathing study which concluded that torture was ineffective and that the CIA had lied about it to two presidents, Congress and the US public.
…
Jones has broken his silence in an extensive series of interviews with the Guardian, expressing dissatisfaction with what he called a lack of accountability for torture at the CIA. He also says the agency, under the leadership of John Brennan was abetted in trying to silence criticism by Barack Obama, the president who banned torture as one of the first acts of his tenure.

“People who played a significant role in this program, who are in the report, continue to play significant roles in sensitive programs at the agency,” said Jones, a former FBI counter-terrorism analyst.

“To me, it’s a huge lost opportunity. Here’s an administration that came in and did all the right things within a few days, shutting down the program … We were just never given a fair airing. No one from the White House would be briefed by us. They were briefed by the CIA.”
…
The Guardian’s findings, to be published in three installments starting today, include:

• How Jones was so afraid the CIA would destroy important evidence, that he covertly removed from a CIA location a classified document, later described as a “smoking gun” by a senator on the committee ;

• A decision that left the investigation of extradjudicial transfers of terror suspects into the hands of foreign intelligence services practically lost to history;

• One of Obama’s most senior aides insisted the Senate obscure a finding that some CIA interrogators who operated at black sites around the world after 9/11 had been accused of domestic abuse and even sexual assault;

• Senators were prepared to suppress the report amid national security concerns, until intelligence chief James Clapper provided the committee with a “farce” of an analysis predicting that its publication would lead to chaos and violence around the world.
…
As the Obama administration’s various cabinet agencies have not even opened the full 6,700-page classified version of the report, critics fear that a government unwilling to grapple with the torture program will at some point return to it.

“The deeper, more endemic problem lies in a CIA, assisted by a White House, that continues to try to cover up the truth. I worry that an agency that has yet to acknowledge these mistakes could continue to make them under a new administration,” said Mark Udall, a former Democratic senator on the committee.

Jones, now a consultant in Washington for the Daschle Group and his own Penn Quarter Group, said that one of the report’s shocking findings was that the CIA misled not just George W Bush on torture, but also Obama.

“This is John Brennan’s CIA, Obama’s CIA,” he said. “They’re providing inaccurate information to the president of the United States in the present day.”

Today’s installment-

Inside the fight to reveal the CIA’s torture secrets
by Spencer Ackerman, The Guardian
Friday 9 September 2016 07.10 EDT

The Panetta Review saga would spur a furious CIA to take an extraordinary step: it would spy on its own legislative overseers – especially Jones. The episode would spill out publicly the following March, when top committee Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who had already taken a huge political risk in pushing the torture inquiry, accused the CIA on the Senate floor of triggering what she called a constitutional crisis. Both sides requested the justice department pursue a criminal investigation on the other. The bitterness would nearly overshadow a landmark report, a fraction of which was released to the public in December 2014, that documented in chilling detail the depravations CIA inflicted on terrorism suspects after 9/11.

The CIA has stopped defending its torture program but not its personnel. While it has reknit its relationship to the committee, thanks to a GOP leadership that has all but disavowed the torture investigation, it continues to maintain that the torture report is inaccurate. Obama, whose trusted aide John Brennan runs the CIA, kept the report at arm’s length, with his administration declining even to read it.

But the CIA has gone beyond successfully suppressing the report. In a grim echo of Jones’s fears, the agency’s inspector general, Langley recently revealed, destroyed its copy – allegedly an accident. Accountability for torture has been the exclusive province of a committee investigation greeted with antipathy by Obama. While Obama prides himself on ending CIA torture, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has vowed if elected to “bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”. Key CIA leaders defending the agency against the committee, including Brennan and former director Michael Morrell, are reportedly seeking to run Langley under Hillary Clinton.