We have not always agreed with Senator Dianne Feinstein on national security issues like wiretapping, but the California Democrat who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee has displayed commitment and courage in the investigation of the illegal detention, abuse and torture of prisoners by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Realizing she had one last chance to get this report to the public before Republicans take over the Senate, Ms. Feinstein released a summary of the findings despite heavy pressure from Republicans and the White House to withhold it. She and her aides deserve enormous credit for their five-and-a-half-year struggle.
Sadly, that is pretty much it on the disclosure front. In post-9/11 America, when it comes to momentous matters of national security, democratic tradition and the rule of law, there is precious little disclosure and no justice and accountability. It’s a bipartisan affliction.
Employees of the C.I.A. and the military, as well as private contractors, illegally detained, tortured and abused prisoners — some of them really dangerous men, but also some who should never have been detained. None of them should have been dealt with in such a shameful and evidently unlawful way.
The jailers and torturers acted on orders that descended from President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, C.I.A. chief George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others. They justified their action with twisted legal memos arguing that torture was not torture when the president wanted to do it.
C.I.A. officers destroyed the videotaped evidence of waterboarding, which for eons was considered to be torture until the Bush administration decided it could be inflicted on Muslim prisoners. The Justice Department, under President Obama, did investigate both the prisoners’ debasement and the destruction of evidence but decided not to file criminal charges.
Under Mr. Bush, foreign citizens with no connection to terrorism were snatched from the streets and, on one occasion, from Kennedy International Airport in New York. They were bound, gagged, blindfolded and flown off to countries that commit even more hideous acts of torture than the ones the C.I.A. seemed to prize so highly. The United States knew, of course, that would happen; it was the point of sending the prisoners to those countries in the first place.
No one was held accountable. When the prisoners were finally set free, their bodies broken and their lives ruined (one was dropped on a remote road in a lonely part of Europe where nobody spoke his language and had to make his way home to a family that had long thought him dead), the United States rolled out its legal guns to make sure that no court ever heard their cases. The excuse was national security. The real reason was that if these stories were told in public, it would be hideously embarrassing to the government.
That policy of concealment continued into the Obama administration, with perhaps even greater zeal than under Mr. Bush. To this day, the United States government will not even acknowledge these abductions, much less apologize or provide compensation.
The Justice Department did not investigate the torture and detention under Mr. Bush; it approved them. President Obama wanted to “look forward” to his own political agenda, so he ruled out making any public inquiry or hearings. Court cases continued to be shut down before a word could be argued; officials who spoke to the press about this and other issues like wiretapping have been prosecuted, along with reporters themselves, with a disturbing enthusiasm.
The Justice Department did start investigating the destruction of the videotapes in 2007, and in 2009, expanded the probe to include broader issues of detention and interrogation. But of course, it was all in secret, and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democratic members found that they couldn’t interview anyone because Justice’s go-nowhere investigation prevented it.
Meanwhile, the C.I.A. made a Nixonian effort to stymie Senate investigators because they had stumbled across the internal review of detention and interrogation. News accounts suggest the report was devastating, but the administration never intended to make it public. Even now, the Justice Department is fighting an effort by The Times to compel disclosure of its own investigation.
We can’t say that no one was punished for abusing prisoners. There were the low-level personnel at Abu Ghraib, for instance, and one former C.I.A. officer connected to the interrogation program is in prison. His name is John Kiriakou. He was prosecuted for being a whistle-blower.
We cannot say, either, that the C.I.A. won’t even address these issues. The head of the agency, John Brennan, held a news conference Thursday at which he acknowledged that pretty much all the forms of brutality listed in the Senate report had occurred at C.I.A. prisons.
Then, in a moment of black comedy, he offered the usual excuse that it was fine because administration lawyers had found a way to make it seem legal. “I will leave to others how they might want to label those activities,” he said.
Mr. Brennan’s lack of interest in further discussion was fairly clear. “My fervent hope is that we can put aside this debate and more forward,” he said.
Unhappily, he’s likely to get his wish.
Source: NYTimes
