Reply #9: At least we will get to see the report [View All]

instead of having to rely on the word of politicians and media with anonymous sources.

It should be noted that Helgerson conducted two well known IG investigations--the 9/11 internal review and the torture review. To date only the executive summary of the 9/11 review has been released. Helgerson called for the convening of disciplinary panels to address the gross misconduct of several high ranking CIA officials but Goss and Hayden refused to do so. It is important to note some of the officials called out by Helgerson in the 9/11 review were key advocates of the torture program. For years we have been led to believe that the torture program was a good faith overreaction by panicked officials who were desperate to prevent follow up attacks. This rationale is questionable for many reasons:

1)Key officials involved in 9/11 failures were promoted. If concern about terrorist attacks was the priority then it doesn't make sense to promote officials who presided over one of the worst intelligence failures in US history.

2)The pre-9/11 conduct of torture program advocates has never been fully examined. For example we have never learned why Alec Station withheld from the FBI (from 1/00 through 8/01) the fact that two ID'ed al Qaeda operatives were in the US.

3)FBI agent Soufan testified that legal FBI methods were working and that the CIA torture program was counterproductive. This is very important as we have been led to believe the torture was a last resort measure required when all legal interrogation methods failed. If the priority was not to attain solid intelligence then of course the legal FBI methods wouldn't have worked. Torture would have been required for false confessions (i.e. linking al Qaeda to Iraq).

4)Scott Shane (NYT) wrote that the CIA interrogator who replaced Soufan 1)didn't speak Arabic 2) had no counterterrorism experience 3)had no interrogation experience. This strongly suggests the CIA wasn't interested in attaining reliable information.