Dec 11, 2014
CIA 'torture' report out; agency accused of lying, brutality
WASHINGTON: A day after a Senate investigation report charged the CIA with using brutal torture techniques and lying about it, American torment was on full display with the US intelligence community closing ranks to defend its methods and liberal elements raging that such activities are un-American and has brought shame on the country.
Not since the Church Committee Report in the 1970s that accused the CIA of domestic spying, botched assassination, drug use and other misconduct has the agency been subjected to such withering scrutiny. It has forced the country's top spymasters to lash back at lawmakers acting as the country's conscience keepers.
On Wednesday, six former directors of the CIA wrote a joint op-ed maintaining that the Senate Intelligence Community's report released on Tuesday "cherry-picked" arguments against the CIA interrogation programmes' effectiveness.
However, UN experts and the human rights community are calling for prosecution of CIA operatives and other contractors who used waterboarding and other torture techniques. Two Washington-state psychologists who fine-tuned the techniques and were paid $80 million by the CIA for their work have come under particular scrutiny.
Top intelligence mavens fanned out on radio and television to defend the agency, warning that exaggerated and distorted accounts of the CIA methods were bound to inflame America's enemies and invite a blowback.
Conservative Republican lawmakers also railed against their liberal counterparts, only stopping short of accusing of them of treason for their indiscretion in releasing the report, even though only a summary of the 6,000-plus page study, with many parts redacted, was made available.
Even that was sufficient to reveal a stomach-churning chronicle of torture and abuse. Rectal injection became the latest term of discussion at office water coolers as Americans wondered, as one magazine asked evocatively, if the CIA went rogue after 9/11.
The Senator at the centre of the expose, California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who at 81 is the oldest serving member of the chamber, and who has had an uneasy equation with the country's intelligence community, revelled in the spotlight in the evening of her distinguished career.
Feinstein has ignited a scrutiny that has both damaged and enhanced US reputation across the world depending on where one stands — damaged because of the appalling methods CIA used and enhanced because only in US could there be such a self-lacerating public examination of a national security programme. It is both America's moment of shame and glory.
Amid the dribble of tawdry and excruciating details, intelligence mavens argued that the atmosphere in the days after 9/11 was totally different than the liberal spirit that seems to be prevailing now: they were tasked with preventing the next 9/11, urgently tracking down bin Laden and other perpetrators, and they were authorized to use any methods to protect the country.
The partisan divide between muscular, national security-driven conservative Republicans and liberal human rights-driven liberal Democrats was all too apparent. But one Republican Senator broke ranks to support Feinstein. John McCain, a former prisoner of war and torture victim himself during the Vietnam War, maintained that torture does not produce useful intelligence; prisoners mostly exaggerate or give false and useless information under torture.
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