Heavily redacted, of course. I don't know how I feel about this. There is transparency and then there is foolish disclosure. If it endangers American lives, then maybe it's better kept behind the closed doors of government (if that is possible anymore) and dealt with however it needs to be. I don't quite get the reason for disclosing this publicly. Are there going to be charges against someone? Reparations? Perhaps as a way to validate former prisoner's claims? I'm confused.

Again, this is yet another way the terrorists changed our country or did they? Did anything similar happen during other wars?

U.S. on alert ahead of release of report on CIA’s use of torture

WASHINGTON – For months, there’s been a battle in the shadows of Washington over a report on torture by the CIA.

The covert conflict saw the CIA spy on Congress. Intelligence officials quietly argued against the report’s release, on the basis that it would endanger American lives. The White House eventually stepped in, mediating negotiations about what to include – and what to black out.

It’s being made public now.

A congressional committee that studied the use of torture during the Bush era is poised Tuesday to release a 480-page executive summary of its findings, a heavily scrutinized and edited synopsis of a broader 6,000-page document compiled by a Senate panel.

The White House said it’s been bracing for this moment. It confirmed reports Monday that U.S. military and diplomatic personnel around the world have been placed on a heightened state of alert.

A spokesman for U.S. President Barack Obama referred to warnings from the intelligence community that the document’s release could inflame passions and lead to violence against Americans.

“That’s why this administration has been working for months to plan for this day,” Josh Earnest said during Monday’s White House briefing.

“There are some indications that the release of the report could lead to a greater risk that is posed to U.S. facilities and individuals all around the world, so the administration has taken the prudent steps to ensure that the proper security precautions are in place at U.S. facilities around the globe.”

But he added, emphatically: the Obama administration supports this document’s release.

The buildup has seemed, at times, like something out of a spy novel.

The CIA admitted to snooping on Senate staffers’ computers while they prepared the report. At first, the agency denied accusations of domestic espionage against the elected body. Eventually, it confessed and apologized, ascribing its actions to the belief that staffers were consulting unauthorized documents.

Still, that failed to mollify members of Congress. Several called for the CIA director’s resignation for what they described as a violation of the country’s basic democratic order.

With elected lawmakers and the intelligence community at odds, the White House waded in. The president sent his top aide to help work out a deal for the document’s release. Barack Obama’s chief of staff, Denis McDonough, made multiple trips last summer to Capitol Hill to negotiate with lawmakers about what to redact.

Bush-era veterans are arguing against the release of this document at all. The former head of the CIA, Michael Hayden, said it could do three types of damage:
•He warned the CIA workforce would feel like it’s been tried and convicted in absentia, because the Senate committee based its work on documents, not personal interviews;
•It could be used by America’s enemies as a promotional tool to inspire new attacks;
•It will abandon allies abroad, he said, referring to countries that helped the U.S. with its extraordinary-rendition program.

Hayden said that he carefully examined the use of so-called enhanced-interrogation techniques when he took over the CIA job. And he said he made an objective decision that it would be wrong to cancel them.

“I was a blank sheet when I went into the CIA in late May 2006,” he told CBS over the weekend.

“This was the elephant in the room. What were we going to do with this program? This had not been my program up to that point – I was free to stop it cold. And I spent the summer of 2006 looking at the facts… In conscience, I couldn’t take it off the table.”

But he said that interrogation techniques were softened considerably, both before and after he arrived. He said three people were waterboarded in total – the last one in March 2003.

He apparently urged his Democratic successor to keep up the tough interrogation methods. In his newly released memoirs, Leon Panetta writes that Hayden “blew a gasket” when his successor referred to past practices as torture, and pleaded to continue extra-judicial interrogations when the two met to discuss the transition following Obama’s 2008 election win.

There’s one Canadian with very different memories of those interrogation techniques.
Maher Arar referred to the human toll Monday. Arar, who was picked up at an airport in 2002 and sent to be tortured in Syria, tweeted: “Heated discussion about upcoming torture report (carry) no mention that actual human beings have suffered lasting physical/psychological scars.”

The report into the CIA comes six years after the Senate released a study into the military – and offered a glimpse into how its interrogation techniques were developed after 9-11.

It described how two instructors from the Navy went to the Guantanamo Bay detention centre in 2002 to teach 24 guards there about methods used by Chinese communists during the Korean War, against American POWs.

The Chinese method came to be rebranded as Biderman’s Principles, after the academic who researched the Korean War practice. He boiled it down to an eight-step program: physical isolation, followed by sensory deprivation, exhaustion and discomfort, threats, occasional rewards, powerlessness, physical degradation, and the enforcement of arbitrary rules.

According to the 2008 Senate report, the Navy trainers handed out a chart on those coercive techniques to the personnel at Guantanamo Bay.

http://globalnews.ca/news/1715502/u-s-o ... f-torture/

The torturing is what has endangered USian lives. Those people have given the green light to USians being tortured.

It's about time!

And yes, the terrorists have won. We may have taken out bin laden and hundreds if not thousands of bad guys. But in the making WE are now the bad guys to our own people. Yep, the terrorists won. We now have the NSA spying on Americans. We have the Patriot Act. Ignorant people are suspicious of people that wear turbans to the point they beat and kill them, not knowing they aren't even Muslims. We go through crazy bs at the airport. Grandmas and babies are being 'searched' before being allowed to fly.

92% redacted, but should still serve the purpose. good OpEd on it here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/postevery ... re-report/

I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that if Dianne Feinstein, Lindsey Graham, and the director of Human Rights Watch all think the report is necessary to prevent the United States from committing the same egregious mistakes in the future, then that countermands the magical thinking needed to accept the worst-case scenarios regarding its publication.

Am I missing anything?

Do you really think it will never be repeated? The report is important, I'll grant you that. And, yes it may prevent future use of such methods.

There will be those who use it to justify what happened. If the published results do not show that it was "necessary", (according to some...), then they will claim that the redacted parts would prove it. The same damn people who cheer the use of torture will continue to think it's a good thing "to gather intelligence, to save lives". Just sayin.

IOW, it won't change the minds of those who worship Bush and his admin.

I'm on the fence about this being a good thing. Time will tell.

I was conflicted for the same reasons roseanne is when chatter about releasing the report became public ~ but, after reflection, I believe it's the right thing to do for the right reasons ~

To me, this sounds like honesty-on-steroids ~ I deeply believe in honesty and in ethics and in the principles I've always believed this nation endorses ~ but honesty, and ethics, and principles aren't always "convenient" to/for some ~ ~ there will never be "a good time" to make these confessions, but we must make them in order to reclaim our credibility ... not only in the world, but even more for ourselves ~

I strongly encourage reading the WaPo op-ed in Mac's above post at http://www.washingtonpost.com/postevery ... re-report/ ~

Sooz

Edited for clarity ~

I am just thinking that the usual bullshit from the far right wing about this report will be what endangers American's lives, if you get what I mean. (see my above post). I hope they will be smart enough to keep their traps shut. I'm talking about the political "celebrities", not ordinary citizens.....

We may reclaim our creds, but the far right wing will shoot them down in a heartbeat if they think it will win some votes for 2016.

Excellent commentary from Steve Benen ~ and if the "Right" is "outraged", then in my own mind it's the 100% correct thing to do ~ emphasis/bolding below is mine ~ Sooz

Right outraged over pending release of torture report
12/09/14 08:00 AM—Updated 12/09/14 08:07 AM
By Steve Benen

Today is the day. The Senate Intelligence Committee spent years studying the details of the Bush/Cheney administration’s torture policies, and today, following extensive bureaucratic wrangling, the panel’s report will be released to the public.

The right is outraged, not by the alleged misdeeds, but by the willingness to, in effect, acknowledge and confess to those misdeeds.


I suppose at a certain level, I can appreciate why the right’s argument may seem compelling: telling the truth about U.S. actions may inflame anti-American passions, enraging our enemies. It’s therefore better, the argument goes, to quietly bury the truth in the name of public safety – if people don’t know the scope and scale of what the Bush/Cheney administration did, maybe we won’t have to deal with the consequences.

The problem, of course, is that this argument is completely wrong. Indeed, when you’re certain that documenting our actions is much worse than the actions themselves, your moral compass needs an adjustment.

Even the Republican premise shouldn’t be accepted at face value. We don’t know for certain, for example, that telling the truth about the Bush/Cheney torture policies will lead to a new round of violence.

Besides, the last time I checked, those who would do us harm weren’t waiting for the results of a committee investigation before going on the offensive.

But even putting that aside, it’s the root principle that deserves attention: the argument for hiding the truth is predicated on the belief that our actions should not have consequences. Those outraged by the release of the facts are suggesting that there should be no cost for crossing moral and legal lines.

For Republicans, all this talk about principles and ideals is nice, but it doesn’t outweigh the practical realities: if exposing the facts may cost lives, it’s just not worth it. As Kevin Drum explained very well, this is a short-sided view that arguably gets the story backwards – releasing the report will bolster, not undermine, our safety.


When a nation makes a mistake, it has a responsibility to understand what went wrong and to take steps to prevent similar mistakes in the future. Today is about taking a necessary step in a just direction.

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/right-outraged-over-pending-release-torture-report

Edited to add: there is a video accessible via the end link ~

Smart girl, roseanne ~ I was reading/posting Benen's commentary [which put things into perspective for me] when you posted your thoughts ~

Sooz

Given my own antipathy and disgust for Darth, his anger [and fear?] only confirms that releasing the report is the right thing to do ~ I'm still thinking about the "... Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU", quote below ~ it does make a strange sort of sense to me ~ emphasis/bolding below is mine ~ Sooz

Cheney blasts torture report he hasn’t seen as ‘a bunch of hooey’
12/09/14 08:42 AM
By Steve Benen

A wide variety of Bush/Cheney administration officials, including former President George W. Bush himself, “decided to link arms” recently and defend the torture policies the U.S. used in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. They have not yet seen the Senate Intelligence Committee report, due to be released today, but they’ve been eager to argue against disclosure, all while launching a p.r. campaign of sorts before the world better understands exactly what they did.

It’s a curious argument: “We didn’t do anything wrong, but for the love of God, please don’t tell anyone what we did.”

Leading the charge, not surprisingly, is former Vice President Dick Cheney, who has not read the report, but is nevertheless comfortable dismissing it as “hooey.”


Referencing CIA officials responsible for executing the administration’s torture policies, Cheney told the New York Times, “They deserve a lot of praise. As far as I’m concerned, they ought to be decorated, not criticized.”

It takes a special kind of person to look back at morally reprehensible misconduct and feel a sense of pride and satisfaction.

The evidence against Cheney’s arguments is overwhelming – torture doesn’t work, and even if it did, there are legal and moral lines the United States is not supposed to cross. The next step is coming to terms with what happens next.

Today is obviously an important step in the process. The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report acknowledges where U.S. officials went wrong, and just as importantly, it’s intended to help ensure we learn from our mistakes.

But Anthony Romero, the executive director of the ACLU, goes a step further in a provocative new op-ed, arguing that President Obama should issue pardons to officials from the Bush/Cheney administration “because it may be the only way to establish, once and for all, that torture is illegal.”


Well, that ought to generate some interesting conversations.

[Video accessible via the end link]

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/cheney-blasts-torture-report-he-hasnt-seen-bunch-hooey

the line of defense is already forming. it is complete bullshit, but it is there:

the report is wrong
there WAS actionable intelligence
blah blah blah

never mind that over 100 innocent people died at the hands of the DOD due to this program.
never mind that people have been imprisoned without cause for over 10 years.
let's defend the whole lot.

sickening.

The only difference between "this time" and other occasions is that the US got caught red-handed. IMO, it won't make a bit of difference.
There's a historical pattern in USian actions. When challenged, the US uses incremental escalation to push back and this continues back and forth until there's a war (giving it another name, like "police action" is bullshit... it's war). Then, if the opponent pushes back hard enough the political costs becomes to great too bear (we have to get re-elected) the US walks away leaving broken countries behind.

I agree history is history ~ but historical facts are always judged in retrospect long after the events and with the great advantage of knowing the results ~

I think you're missing the likely effect of publicly releasing this information, oskar ~ especially this close to the acts themselves ~

Sooz

There's an easy solution, you know.

Enormous information to plow thru linked below ~ FTR, the "our report" live-link below is to our #8 post in this thread ~ Sooz

Intel Committee releases report on Bush-era torture
12/09/14 11:40 AM
By Steve Benen

As promised, the Senate Intelligence Committee released its full report this morning on the “enhanced interrogation techniques” used by the Bush/Cheney administration. The document is online here (pdf), but note that it’s quite long and delays in load time should be expected.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the committee’s chairwoman, summarized the four key findings of the report this way:


Note, the link is to a 500-page executive summary of a longer, more comprehensive set of materials. It also includes plenty of redactions.

We’ll have more after reviewing the document, but for now, here’s msnbc’s coverage; here’s a report from NBC News on the findings; and here’s our report from this morning on why it’s important to disclose the committee’s findings, despite concerns about violent repercussions.

I was also struck by Feinstein herself offering a compelling defense in support of disclosure: [video accessible via the end link]

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/intel-committee-releases-report-bush-era-torture#break

No mention of the US armed forces' involvement?
It was only the CIA?

oskar, you're being impossible ~ how about tamping down your disbelief and assumptions until people have had time to review the entire document [which itself is a 500 page executive summary to a much longer document] ~

Sooz

Feinstein is one of the report's authors. She's the one who is pointing fingers at the CIA and no one else with her 4 points.

And maybe those 4 points are HER take-aways ~ apparently all we Americans keep falling short of your expectations ~ I prefer to wait and read a fuller than 4 points report ~

Sooz

If there are no prosecutions (where there is sufficient evidence), and sentences where guilt is established, it's all for nothing. It merely becomes another meaningless decoration and very little will change.

If Germany can admit to the holocaust then America can and should admit to our sins. "Lest we forget".

This is the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA ~

Sooz

Exactly, Cannalee ~ and not only "should" we, in my view we must ~

Sooz

I think Oskar brings a valid question to the discussion: will the Armed Services Commitem be coming forward with an investigation and report of their own?