Is it true that the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report is going to set off a new debate about whether or not our country did, in fact, torture detainees during the Bush administration? If former CIA acting general counsel John Rizzo is right that a state secret is still a state secret until the government officially acknowledges its truth, what are we to make of this?
“We tortured some folks,” President Barack Obama said in July. “We did some things that are contrary to our values.”
The president has already admitted the truth.
That doesn’t mean that the country’s national security elite is prepared to be held accountable for its actions, however, and there are always reasons why telling the truth about what was done will be dangerous or have negative consequences.
There are three main concerns about the release of the report. The first is that it might reveal which countries allowed us to set up so-called “black prisons” where some of the torture took place. The idea here is that we won’t be able to get foreign cooperation for future covert operations that are legitimate if we sell out the leaders who helped us commit crimes against humanity. I don’t think I have to elaborate on how morally problematic this is, but the premise is that we did some bad things but we aren’t bad by nature. No one, here at home or even abroad, should be exposed or held accountable for torturing people, and other countries should continue to lend us assistance because we won’t drag them down into an ethical morass again.
The way this concern was handled was to insist on extensive redactions in the report so that smart people won’t be able to surmise which countries are being referred to.
John Rizzo, who served as the CIA’s acting general counsel during the black-site program and later wrote a memoir, “Company Man,” said the agency has long fought against declassifying any information on the locations of the secret prisons overseas. “That was something we had fought for years and years,” Rizzo told us. “Up to now one of the only remaining classified facts about the program was the names of countries where there were black sites.”
Rizzo said the concern about even referencing the locations of the black sites is that one could piece together the locations with other information that is likely to be in the final public report.
This is a lot of effort to avoid embarrassment for countries like Poland, Lithuania, and Thailand that everyone already knows allowed black prison sites on their turf. But it’s really about finding a reason not to release the report at all.
In June 2013, the top intelligence official at the State Department, Philip Goldberg, wrote a classified letter to Congress warning against the disclosure of the names of countries who had participated in the program.
That letter prompted two Republican members of the committee, Marco Rubio of Florida and James Risch of Idaho, to come out against the public release of the report altogether, saying in a statement that “declassification of this report could endanger the lives of American diplomats and citizens overseas and jeopardize U.S. relations with other countries.”
The second main concern is that CIA officers who are subjects in the report might be identifiable even if pseudonyms are used. The Senate Intelligence Committee wanted to use pseudonyms so that the reader can follow characters in the report, but the CIA has prevailed and the result is that the summary of the report (which is all that may be released) will be incoherent and hard to understand. A less debased country might be seeking to expose precisely the officers responsible for torture, but we’ve given amnesty to the policy makers so it would be wrong to hold only those who carried their actions out accountable.
The third concern is what led Secretary of State John Kerry to call the chairman of the committee yesterday morning. According to Bloomberg View, Kerry called Sen. Diane Feinstein of California to ask her delay the release of report because it “could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad” to release it now. To this, we can also add another consideration: the risk that terrorists might respond to the report by executing hostages.
Earlier, sources aware of the call had said Kerry expressed concern that the release of a 500-page summary of the report could complicate tense foreign policy issues being addressed by the State Department.
One source said one concern was that Islamic militant groups holding U.S. hostages would execute them once the report is released. At least three Americans, including one woman, are currently believed to be held by such groups.
This concern is only heightened by the fact that an American and a South African hostage were executed yesterday during a failed rescue attempt.
All of these things are ways of putting immense pressure on Diane Feinstein to delay the report beyond the point where she has to hand the gavel of the Intelligence Committee over to Republican Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina who will bury it for good. If she ignores Kerry’s warning and releases the report, she’ll take the blame if our overseas facilities are attacked or diplomats or hostages are executed. So, isn’t this too clever by half?
[State Department] Spokeswoman Jen Psaki said in a statement that Kerry repeated his support for the release of the findings and “made clear that the timing is of course her choice.”
Basically all the versions of this story in print today have the same kind of disclaimers from the administration.
Some Obama administration critics say the CIA and White House had been trying to delay the release until after control of the Senate shifts in January to Republicans, some of whom have fiercely criticized the investigation.
White House National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said, however, that President Barack Obama wanted the report declassified as soon as possible.
Sources familiar with the matter confirm to CBS News State Department Correspondent Margaret Brennan that Secretary of State John Kerry called and requested, but did not pressure, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, the chairwoman of the Intelligence Committee, to hold off on releasing the report. The administration has some concerns about the safety of diplomats abroad.
Kerry “called his former colleague to discuss the broader implications of the timing of the report’s release because a lot is going on in the world, and he wanted to make sure that foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” the State Department said in a statement. “That anyone would mischaracterize this call or question reasonable, proper, private discussions raises questions about what they’re trying to accomplish.”
Reports of the Kerry’s phone call surfaced shortly after White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday that the administration welcomed the pending release of the investigation’s findings.
“The president has long advocated the declassified release of this report, so we certainly welcome the news from the committee that they are planning to do so next week,” White House spokesman Earnest said.
Yes, the administration absolutely “welcomes” the release of the report. It’s just that they want it to be abundantly clear that releasing the report right now will potentially get diplomats and hostages killed, our foreign facilities attacked, and negatively impact sensitive negotiations with foreign powers.
We’ve seen before with the controversy over the attacks in Benghazi, Libya how violence committed against our people abroad can be politicized beyond comprehension. So, these are just the kind of difficulties and risks that have to be dealt with by anyone who would ever seek to tell the truth about crimes against humanity committed by our national security establishment.
You have to have courage to even attempt it.
Sen. Mark Udall, a Colorado Democrat who is on the intelligence committee and has suggested he is willing to read the torture report on the Senate floor to ensure its release, said he doubted that publicly disclosing its findings would pose any serious national security issues.
“Our nation has proven time and again that we can and should responsibly acknowledge our mistakes—even when the United States is engaged in military activities abroad, as we were in Iraq when the U.S. Army publicly released its investigation into Abu Ghraib—and that doing so makes us stronger and more secure,” his spokesman Mike Saccone said in a statement.
Of course, Sen. Mark Udall just lost his seat in Congress. He definitely wasn’t rewarded for his willingness to stand up to the Intelligence Community. But, he’s right. In the long run, we aren’t fooling anyone by refusing to come clean about our sins, hold people accountable, ask for forgiveness, and attempt to atone for them. In the long run, this makes us less safe.
It also makes us less worthy of respect.
