There Is Something Worse Than Torture in the Senate Torture Report

There Is Something Worse Than Torture in the Senate Torture Report
It's not the torture—it's the CIA lying.

—By David Corn
| Wed Dec. 10, 2014 2:11 PM EST


There is something more troubling in the Senate intelligence committee's torture report than the brutal depictions of the extreme (and arguably illegal) interrogation practices employed by CIA officers in the years after the 9/11 attacks: the lying.

The accounts of rectal rehydration, long-term sleep deprivation, waterboarding, forced standing (for days), and wrongful detentions are shocking. And the committee's conclusion that CIA torture yielded little, if any, valuable information (including during the hunt for Osama bin Laden) is a powerful counter to those who still contend that so-called enhanced interrogation techniques are effective. But the report presents a more basic and profound question that the nation still faces in the post-torture era: can secret government work? In fact, while pundits and politicians are pondering the outrageous details of the executive summary, not many have realized that the report, in a way, presents a constitutional crisis.

The basic debate over torture has been settled. In his first days in office, President Barack Obama signed an executive order outlawing the use of these interrogation methods. Since then, the question has been what to reveal about the CIA's use of torture during the Bush-Cheney days and whether anyone ought to be prosecuted. But those matters, too, have been mostly resolved. The committee's report was released after a lengthy struggle between the CIA and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the panel; and in his first term, Obama ruled out criminal prosecutions of officials and officers engaged in sketchy counter-terrorism actions in the previous administration. But there is a foundational issue that remains: how the US government conducts clandestine operations. The Senate torture report raises the possibility that much-needed checks and balances may not function because of CIA mendacity.

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The Senate torture report offers an appalling narrative of CIA prevarication. In fact, anyone who has read the major congressional reports on intelligence activity and abuses in the four decades since the Church Committee first revealed CIA wrongdoing would find the new report shocking in terms of its depiction of CIA lying (though it does not use the l-word).

The report notes that the CIA misled the White House, the National Security Council, the Justice Department, and Congress about the effectiveness of its extreme interrogation techniques. The CIA did not tell policymakers the truth about the brutality of its interrogations and the confinement conditions for its detainees. The agency repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Justice Department about its detention and interrogation program, and this prevented the Justice Department from supplying solid legal analysis. The CIA was late in telling the Senate Intelligence Committee about its use of torture and did not respond to information requests from the committee. The agency (at the direction of the White House) did not initially brief the secretaries of state and defense about its interrogation methods. It provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the FBI and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. CIA officials gave inaccurate information about its enhanced interrogation techniques to the agency's inspector general. The CIA never compiled an accurate list of the individuals it detained or subjected to torture. The CIA also ignored objections and criticisms raised by its own officers about its detention and interrogation program.

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http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2014/12/senate-torture-report-cia-lying-crisis-oversight