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.
