Truthout: The Implications of the Torture Report (and the torturers' hysterical reactions to it)

The Implications of the Torture Report
Tuesday, 16 December 2014 00:00
By Mike Lofgren, Truthout | News Analysis

The reaction to the Senate Intelligence Committee's "Study of the CIA's Detention and Interrogation Program" is as significant as what the study uncovered about the psychology and methods of those who run the Deep State that rules us.

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The present writer will take as a given the veracity of its three main findings: that the United States engaged in practices both legally and commonly definable as torture; that the actionable intelligence these practices produced was negligible; and that the practices tainted the moral prestige of the United States government in a manner that damaged its foreign policy. These assertions may be taken as true both because of the abundant evidence presented in the report itself and because of the flailing and hysterical reaction by our country's national security elites.

"Hysteria" does not arise from groundless causes, but from a guilty and conflicted id seeking to displace blame from itself onto others. The reaction to the senate study is as significant as the facts that the study uncovered in providing a window on the psychology and methods of those who run the Deep State - the hybrid association of key elements of government and parts of top-level finance and industry that is effectively able to govern the United States with limited reference only to the consent of the governed as it is normally expressed through the formal political process. This essay will discuss some of the implications of that reaction.

President Obama is an operative of the Deep State, but it is unclear whether he is its master or its prisoner. The president's role in this affair has been extremely puzzling. On March 11, 2014, when the torture issue blew up in the senate because of Intelligence Committee chair Diane Feinstein's allegations of CIA spying on her committee's staff members, she said that the White House had been supportive of her committee's probe of CIA activities. That may have been true, but that is still only what she said she believed. It is hardly beyond the realm of plausibility that the president or one of his aides told her that the White House was supportive of her committee's investigation while at the same time tolerating, or even encouraging, CIA obstruction. But suppose the president did support the committee's probe? That would imply that the White House does not really control the CIA. In either case, whether from obstruction or lack of control, the implications of the CIA's spying on Congress merited Senator Feinstein's description of it as a constitutional crisis.

Obama showed a similar split personality nine months later when the report was finally released. The president, and his White House press secretary, insisted that he was in favor of the public seeing the study (or at least the redacted summary of it). Yet on the Friday before its release, John Kerry, the most senior cabinet official in the government, called Senator Feinstein and urged her not to disclose it, saying "Lots of things going on in the world; not a good time for disclosure."

For the Deep State, attack is the preferred form of defense. National security elites have been preparing a vigorous counterattack for months. Because of the seriousness of the crimes in which CIA officers may have been implicated, chairwoman Feinstein reluctantly agreed to the CIA's request that some of the current and former CIA officers mentioned in the senate report should have the opportunity to read it prior to its release. This was an unusual concession, since subjects of congressional investigations are not normally made privy to the contents of a report before the public finds out, but it is not a completely unreasonable request given the gravity of the allegations against these individuals. ... The CIA's strategy was crystal clear: Its request to the senate was less about keeping faith with its dutiful foot soldiers than about priming its former big-shots with an advance look at the report so that they could go on an immediate public relations counteroffensive against the document on the day it was publicly released.

Much much more: http://truth-out.org/news/item/28020-the-implications-of-the-torture-report