Glenn Greenwald unloads on torture, CIA and Washington’s rotten soul.
It took years until the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report — which shows not only that the CIA’s torture regime was larger and more vicious than understood, but that the agency repeatedly lied about it to the White House and Congress — was finally released to the public. But it only took hours before President Obama was once again urging the nation to look forward, not back. “Rather than another reason to refight old arguments,” read a White House statement, “I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past.” When members of the media asked whether that meant the White House considered torture to be ineffective, as the report claims, an anonymous official said Obama would not “engage” in the ongoing “debate.” On the issues of rape, waterboarding and induced hypothermia, apparently, reasonable minds can differ.
Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and longtime critic of the war on terror, disagrees. “There’s no debate,” he told Salon. “Everything that we did,” he continued, “in terms of how we treated detainees, has [long] been viewed as morally vile and inexcusable and criminal.” Greenwald has little doubt, however, that Washington will turn torture into yet another partisan squabble. It’s the go-to move, he says, when America’s political and media elite decide they’d rather look the other way. “That’s just the ritual Washington engages in,” Greenwald said. (...)
One thing I want to establish as much as we can is who was involved in the lead-up to this release, and what role they played. So why did it take so long for this to be released?
Well, first of all, there was a major war between the Senate [Intelligence] Committee and the CIA over access to the information [the committee] wanted. That took years.
Secondly, there was a huge conflict between the committee and the White House, which, on its own, tried to stifle and suppress all kinds of vital material. In fact, there were 9,000 documents that the CIA and the White House — together, as part of the executive branch — refused to give to the committee.
So much of it was just grappling over access to information (which is ironic, since this committee is supposed to exercise oversight of the CIA …)
Also, the material was complicated. There were raw reports from all over the world, and it can take a long time to sort through that and put together a comprehensive report. So, I don’t think it’s surprising that it took this long.
And did anything in the summary surprise you? Or was it more or less what you expected after covering this for so many years?
Honestly, there wasn’t really anything that surprised me in terms of the disclosures.
There’s obviously new details about some of the more brutal interrogations; there are details and lots of corroborating pieces of evidence about the extent to which the CIA just outright lied, publicly, and to Congress. Part of what surprised me was how overt and unflinching the report was about essentially accusing people like [former CIA head] Gen. Hayden of being pathological liars.
But the broad strokes of the program and what the CIA did have long been known — for years — and I think what was more important about Tuesday was the ritual of official Washington finally admitting it.
Yeah, what’s striking to me about the lying is just how clearly it shows that the CIA in many ways is operating outside the system of democratic accountability. It’d be wrong to say it’s like the CIA runs the country, since there’s a bunch of stuff they don’t really care about besides intelligence and so forth, but it certainly looks like they don’t really answer to anyone.
The CIA cares about a lot more than just intelligence. They care a lot about private contracts (because so many of their colleagues work at those very lucrative private contracting jobs where a lot of them hope to go when they leave the CIA); they care about militarism and the assertion of force in the world (they run the drone program); they do all kinds of military activities beyond just the gather of intelligence. But you’re obviously right that the CIA exists beyond democratic accountability — and has for decades.
If I had to identify one key point from Tuesday, the thing that bothered me most about the narrative: Yes, the CIA goes off on its own and does things that political officials don’t know about; and yes, they mislead and lie to the committees that oversee them; and they do all these horrible things, the details of which are sometimes unknown to the political branches — but that’s how Washington wants it.
They’ve always wanted it that way. That’s what the CIA does. The CIA does the dirty work of the political branches of Washington and when they get caught, publicly, the ritual is that official Washington pretends that it was just these rogue CIA officers doing this without anyone’s knowledge or approval. It’s exactly what happened in the Iran-Contra scandal, which was ordered at the highest levels of the White House by President Reagan … but when they got caught, they said: Oh, it was Oliver North and these rogue CIA officers who were doing this without our knowledge!
That’s just the ritual Washington engages in; the CIA is kind of like their wild pit bull that they purposely let off leash. They don’t want to see the mauling but they know that it’s happening, and pretend they don’t know. And when it gets reported, they pretend that they’re horrified.
by Elias Isquith, Salon | Read more:
Image: Silvia Izquierdo/AP
It took years until the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report — which shows not only that the CIA’s torture regime was larger and more vicious than understood, but that the agency repeatedly lied about it to the White House and Congress — was finally released to the public. But it only took hours before President Obama was once again urging the nation to look forward, not back. “Rather than another reason to refight old arguments,” read a White House statement, “I hope that today’s report can help us leave these techniques where they belong — in the past.” When members of the media asked whether that meant the White House considered torture to be ineffective, as the report claims, an anonymous official said Obama would not “engage” in the ongoing “debate.” On the issues of rape, waterboarding and induced hypothermia, apparently, reasonable minds can differ.Glenn Greenwald, the Intercept’s Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and longtime critic of the war on terror, disagrees. “There’s no debate,” he told Salon. “Everything that we did,” he continued, “in terms of how we treated detainees, has [long] been viewed as morally vile and inexcusable and criminal.” Greenwald has little doubt, however, that Washington will turn torture into yet another partisan squabble. It’s the go-to move, he says, when America’s political and media elite decide they’d rather look the other way. “That’s just the ritual Washington engages in,” Greenwald said. (...)
One thing I want to establish as much as we can is who was involved in the lead-up to this release, and what role they played. So why did it take so long for this to be released?
Well, first of all, there was a major war between the Senate [Intelligence] Committee and the CIA over access to the information [the committee] wanted. That took years.
Secondly, there was a huge conflict between the committee and the White House, which, on its own, tried to stifle and suppress all kinds of vital material. In fact, there were 9,000 documents that the CIA and the White House — together, as part of the executive branch — refused to give to the committee.
So much of it was just grappling over access to information (which is ironic, since this committee is supposed to exercise oversight of the CIA …)
Also, the material was complicated. There were raw reports from all over the world, and it can take a long time to sort through that and put together a comprehensive report. So, I don’t think it’s surprising that it took this long.
And did anything in the summary surprise you? Or was it more or less what you expected after covering this for so many years?
Honestly, there wasn’t really anything that surprised me in terms of the disclosures.
There’s obviously new details about some of the more brutal interrogations; there are details and lots of corroborating pieces of evidence about the extent to which the CIA just outright lied, publicly, and to Congress. Part of what surprised me was how overt and unflinching the report was about essentially accusing people like [former CIA head] Gen. Hayden of being pathological liars.
But the broad strokes of the program and what the CIA did have long been known — for years — and I think what was more important about Tuesday was the ritual of official Washington finally admitting it.
Yeah, what’s striking to me about the lying is just how clearly it shows that the CIA in many ways is operating outside the system of democratic accountability. It’d be wrong to say it’s like the CIA runs the country, since there’s a bunch of stuff they don’t really care about besides intelligence and so forth, but it certainly looks like they don’t really answer to anyone.
The CIA cares about a lot more than just intelligence. They care a lot about private contracts (because so many of their colleagues work at those very lucrative private contracting jobs where a lot of them hope to go when they leave the CIA); they care about militarism and the assertion of force in the world (they run the drone program); they do all kinds of military activities beyond just the gather of intelligence. But you’re obviously right that the CIA exists beyond democratic accountability — and has for decades.
If I had to identify one key point from Tuesday, the thing that bothered me most about the narrative: Yes, the CIA goes off on its own and does things that political officials don’t know about; and yes, they mislead and lie to the committees that oversee them; and they do all these horrible things, the details of which are sometimes unknown to the political branches — but that’s how Washington wants it.
They’ve always wanted it that way. That’s what the CIA does. The CIA does the dirty work of the political branches of Washington and when they get caught, publicly, the ritual is that official Washington pretends that it was just these rogue CIA officers doing this without anyone’s knowledge or approval. It’s exactly what happened in the Iran-Contra scandal, which was ordered at the highest levels of the White House by President Reagan … but when they got caught, they said: Oh, it was Oliver North and these rogue CIA officers who were doing this without our knowledge!
That’s just the ritual Washington engages in; the CIA is kind of like their wild pit bull that they purposely let off leash. They don’t want to see the mauling but they know that it’s happening, and pretend they don’t know. And when it gets reported, they pretend that they’re horrified.
by Elias Isquith, Salon | Read more:
Image: Silvia Izquierdo/AP
