I agree with the Los Angeles Times’ editorial board that the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on torture should be promptly declassified. I also agree that the CIA has a conflict of interest in carrying out that declassification, and that the president should intervene to assure that the Executive Branch doesn’t try to whitewash the damaging information contained in the report.
There has to be a better way to handle declassification of reports that are focused on bad behavior by the intelligence community than having the intelligence community handle the declassification. At a minimum, a different agency should be in charge. Let the Director of National Intelligence handle it, or the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the NSA, or the National Security Council. Any group but the CIA.
I also want to know what were supposed to do with this report once we learn of its contents in detail. Are we supposed to do nothing? Isn’t the problem here that we have the legislative branch detailing serious crimes and yet no one is going to be held legally accountable for those crimes. This idea that the main point of creating this report is to dissuade future leaders from resorting to torture seems to be undermined by the fact that the torturers got away with their torture.
Look, I understand why the Obama administration didn’t come into office during a financial crisis and set up Nuremberg Trials to deal with their predecessors. But there’s a huge cost to not defining what the Bush/Cheney regime did as illegal and punishable by significant jail time. It corrodes our moral authority very, very badly.
When Vladimir Putin invades Ukraine and basically annexes Crimea, and when he gives a green light to harass gays and lesbians, we have the problem that we invaded Iraq and tortured the crap out of a lot of Iraqis. We have a little Gitmo problem. We have the waterboarding. There’s a whole legacy of shit that we have to eat over and over and over again, forever, because those maniacs are walking free.
Airing our dirty laundry on this again with a Senate report isn’t really going to do squat to fix this problem if no one goes to jail.