The Obama administration totally deserves the rough treatment it gets in this morning’s New York Times.
Senator Angus King, a member of the Intelligence Committee, said that Hollywood depictions of torture have distorted the public’s view of its efficacy.
“Every week, Jack Bauer saves civilization by torturing someone, and it works,” said Mr. King, the independent from Maine, referring to the lead character of the television show “24.”
Mr. King said that he was initially skeptical about the need to release the torture report, but when he spent five straight evenings reading it in a secure room on Capitol Hill he decided that the C.I.A. abuses needed a public airing.
“It went from interest, to a sick feeling, to disgust, and finally to anger,” he said.
But the Obama administration has made clear that it has no plans to make anyone legally accountable for the practices described by the C.I.A. as enhanced interrogation techniques and the Intelligence Committee as torture.
To be clear, this isn’t the Times’ editorial board; it is front-page reporting by Mark Mazzetti, who comes out of the box swinging with a 1976 quote from James Angleton.
WASHINGTON — Over a lunch in Washington in 1976, James J. Angleton, for years the ruthless chief of counterintelligence at the C.I.A., likened the agency to a medieval city occupied by an invading army.
“Only, we have been occupied by Congress,” he told a young congressional investigator. “With our files rifled, our officials humiliated, and our agents exposed.”
The spymaster had cause for worry. He had endured a public grilling about his role in domestic spying operations by a select committee headed by Senator Frank Church, a Democrat from Idaho, that spent years looking into intelligence abuses. And the Central Intelligence Agency, used to doing what it wanted while keeping Congress mostly in the dark, was in the midst of convulsions that would fundamentally remake its mission.
Evidently, nothing of that sort will be happening this time around. The president appears to take Sun Tzu’s counsel, and I’ve never been wholly convinced that this isn’t the wiser course, at least from a selfish perspective.
Nonetheless, we all reserve the right to wish it were not so.
Some transparency is nice. Course corrections are better. Expressions of remorse and regret are an improvement over fatuous post-hoc justifications for serial human rights abuses. But, really, there is no substitute for accountability.
Is it simply too perilous to try to hold the Intelligence Community accountable?
You know, maybe it really is.
But, if that’s the case, it seems all the more imperative to hold Bush administration officials accountable. They were, after all, the ones who gave the orders.
I’ve been mulling over what you suggested over a week ago. Namely, that the CIA should be busted into pieces. Like Senator Angus King I went from interest in your comment to complete agreement with heaps of anger attached, after watching a television documentary of all things. I received a Christmas gift from my nephew in the form of a multi-volume dvd set of “Secrets Of War” with Charlton Heston of all people as the show’s host.
Mr. Gun Nut held no punches when it came to the C.I.A. Their involvement in Chile was disgraceful. What I took away from that program is that amongst Chile’s military establishment there really wasn’t an over-riding hostility towards Allende’s fledgling presidency. Nixon and Kissinger and the CIA created opposition from a fringe group surrounding Pinochet who was essentially a backbencher. This came as a surprise to me because I always assumed Pinochet was a self propelled fascist who was opposed to Allende from day one of his presidency. What Nixon and that goon Kissinger came up with was a fascist solution plain and simple. Why piss on the lives of four hundred thousand American servicemen who paid the ultimate price thirty years before in WWII in order to employ Nazi principles, with similar goals/objectives in 1972? It’s a complete disgrace to their supreme sacrifice, a form of madness, and thoroughly undemocratic. I see now why Dwight D. Eisenhower loathed Nixon to the point of reconsidering him for a return as vice president on the 1956 Presidential ticket. And throughout this documentary Kissinger continues with the lying to save his ninety year old arse. He was the Dick Cheney of his time. So, yeah, that agency needs to go the way of the Do Do bird and
Tricky Dicky. It’s a fossil past its prime.
Yeah it was nice when Booman crossed over to join us on the dark side.
I know most people here will disagree with me, but I believe it was not a coincidence that JFK was murdered after stating he wanted the CIA shattered into a million pieces. Between the aborted Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missle Crisis, JFK pissed off many in the military and the CIA.
I recommend JFK and the Unspeakable by James W. Douglass.
The CIA was never out of control. It never did one damned thing shocking to liberals without a president telling it to. That includes deceiving the public and the congress.
Show me the paperwork that proves that.
I have seen in my career masters of reverse delegation. And all sorts of skunk works beyond the vision of the chain of command. And that’s in a commercial environment. I don’t think that office politics is any different in the Federal government or even in the intelligence community.
No. You are confusing the horse and the rider.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?
We are facing serious legitimacy issues with the institutions that have a monopoly on force. Yesterday, you wrote about the NYPD. Today, about CIA torture.
In both cases, the issue is the failure of those institutions to submit to Constitutionally required accountability. And the further legitimacy crisis in that the executive who of rights is empowered to call for that accountability is reluctant for fear of creating a mutiny that brings down Constitutional order altogether.
It is, as they say locally, one mell of a hess.
And Sun Tzu is wise counsel under such circumstances as long as one understands that as a temporary tactic and not a permanent principle. That at some point the “enemy” will of course have to be defeated by someone if not by one’s own hand. And that it is a matter of the appropriate time, place, and agent.
Three years ago when I started being concerned about the momentum that the national security architecture put in place by the Truman administration had gained in 65 years, I never thought that the crisis would be this deep. I never imagined that the partisan game in Congress would make it totally dysfunctional for any serious governance not a matter of bipartisan kowtowing to lobbyists. I had not imagined that the Snowden leaks would occur or that the CIA would blatantly spy on the Congressional committee to which it was accountable or that Congress would be managing government finances with perpetual continuing resolutions.
It will take the Republican Congress to legitimize the holding of the CIA accountable and it will take another branch of the national security institutions to bring the people involved in this activity into the light and into custody for whatever process of accountability — trial and referral the International Criminal Court would be preferable from a long-term historical perspective.
But the Republican Congress would want to rein in executive power generally and not just Democratic presidential power in order to do that. Given the personalization of this administration by Republicans, that is hard to imagine. Given the implications for what would be required in reining in the national security state and the lobbying largesse that it brings, that would be hard to imagine for both caucuses in Congress.
And most of the media is working very hard to cover up all of points of crisis as quickly as possible. How quickly the story became the wake for two policemen instead of the drumbeat every couple weeks of yet another unarmed black young man killed by a cop. How quickly the story about torture was dropped from sight with the next shiny object. If the media ever turns and starts facing the issues that the torture report raises, there might be movement to have an accounting. Until then expect frequent appearances of our “distinguished” former Vice President going on about how the Obama administration is weakening America.
Getting all the information into the open will be a struggle. But one good start would be with Mitchell and Jesson, the psychologists who created the architecture of the torture program and according to Jeff Kaye were trying to sell it even before the Bush administration came to power. There might be deeper CIA history about torture that reaches back to its founding in fact.
I’m pessimistic about getting a real human rights policy out of the US government from this point forward. What we are likely to do is discover a systematic policy of hypocrisy known to all of the insiders but not to the public that allows the US to appear to hold enough of the moral high ground to make it attractive to people from other countries–the promise of America and all that. And at the center of our national security state was fundamental illegality and criminality that every day betrayed that promise in a downward spiral. And that more of the public is just now seeing that.
I believe we have a tremendous amount of transparency about the US government right now, and it is not a pretty sight. Nor was it freely offered as policies of transparency are often pitched.
My pessimism comes at the point that voters who cannot hold the Republicans accountable for the crap that Congress has become are not likely to hold the Bush administration accountable or even see the need to when it comes to violations of US war crimes law and international law. For the same reason they are not willing to hold cops accountable even with videoed evidence of blatant murder.
Too many people in this country are “beyond caring”. They have been abused by daily life over the past 30 years to the point that they have shut down. And that numbness tolerates any amount of torture.
We are facing serious legitimacy issues with the institutions that have a monopoly on force. Yesterday, you wrote about the NYPD. Today, about CIA torture.
Did you hear what happened at the funerals today, or at least the funeral for Officer Ramos?
I just read about it. I think that the NYPD could do with some right-sizing to put more cops on the streets. Taking out the layer between the officers and the captains and the layers between the captains and the deputy commissioners could just about do that, don’t you think? It would bring the police closer to the community and closer to the Mayor’s new directions.
I bet an AFL-CIO patrolman’s union might work out better than a PBA-affiliated union.
It just seems like there are a lot of sergeants and white shirts who are deadwood in the NYPD, guys and gals who are more trouble for the city than they are worth. Other politicians are restructuring and decertifying. Why not de Blasio?
I started a reply to this post. It jes’ growed. Llike Topsy. Now a stand-alone post.
“Serious Countries Don’t Issue Blanket Mulligans?” Oh yes they do!!!
Read it. If you dare.
Later…
AG
There was a Voltaire quote, to the effect that if you want to know who rules over you simply see who you can’t criticize. I’d amend that to add “and those who you can’t indict.”
Side by side with the NYPD is the CIA.
Speaking of Hollywood there’s also the converse, 2012 public relations effort Argo
Does anyone really think they could get a conviction? Not that Cheney, Addington and Yoo aren’t guilty as shit, but would a jury of Americans convict them?
Sadly, I don’t think so.
And an acquittal would further cement the legitimacy of torture in the minds of its apologists.
There should have been a truth and reconciliation-style commission to air this and stigmatize it.
I’m afraid we were never going to get convictions because people are fearful sheep.
NY Times: “But the Obama administration has made clear that it has no plans to make anyone legally accountable for the practices described by the C.I.A. as enhanced interrogation techniques and the Intelligence Committee as torture.”
No, it doesn’t work that way. It is not up to Obama or anyone in the WHite House, or anyone in Congress, either. It is up to Federal prosecutors. THEY are the ones who choose to bring the charges before a federal grand jury with the hopes that the grand jury will indict.
The WH has nothing to do with that process. Technically and officially, anyway.
What the NYT is saying is that Obama’s administration is not going to push for prosecutors to put any cases to a grand jury. With properly acting federal prosecutors, that should not make a difference.
According to the Geneva Conventions of 1949:
Thus:
1.) The US must have enacted such laws long ago to prosecute these sorts of violations (Art 49)
2.) The US is REQUIRED to search out such persons and prosecute them (art 49)
And what are the “grave breaches” (Art 50)?
1.) wilful killing,
2.) torture or inhuman treatment, including biological experiments,
3.) wilfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and
4.) extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.
The Senate Committee Report lays out a prima facie case for the US government, and against the people named within it. Thus it now becomes incumbent – nay, REQUIRED – that the US prosecute according to the procedures set up after the Geneva Conventions of 1949.