Bush Cronies, Inside and Outside Obama Admin Will Stage Defensive Response to Senate Torture Report
from David Wise at Reuters:
Forcing the CIA to Admit Some Ugly Truths
____ George Tenet, who presided over the CIA when terrorist suspects were waterboarded and subjected to other forms of brutal “enhanced interrogation,” has set himself a near-impossible task. He is leading an effort to discredit an impending Senate committee report expected to lay out a case that the intelligence agency tortured suspects and then misled Congress, the White House and the public about its detention and interrogation program . . .
Tenet’s efforts to refute the coming report look like classic spycraft. In espionage tradition, spies, if caught, are trained to deny everything — no matter how overwhelming the evidence against them. CIA Director John Brennan, for example, at first vigorously denied that the agency had hacked into the computers used by the Senate Intelligence Committee to compile its voluminous report. ”Let me assure you,” Brennan told the senators in March, “the CIA was in no way spying on the Senate committee.” On Thursday, however, Brennan was forced to admit that five CIA officers — including two lawyers — had done just that . . .
Tenet can also be expected to argue that the methods used by CIA interrogators were adopted in the desperate days after Sept. 11, when U.S. intelligence — having failed to predict or prevent the tragedy at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — was determined to extract from prisoners any hint of future attacks. Yet other intelligence veterans, including FBI agents who witnessed some harsh interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, insist that establishing a rapport with suspects works better than torture — in part because prisoners subjected to painful techniques may tell their tormenters anything, including false information, to get them to stop . . .
Against this background, Tenet is understandably unhappy about the looming and exhaustive Senate report. What makes Tenet’s counter-report effort even more intriguing is that Brennan is his protégé and served as Tenet’s chief of staff. Though an analyst by background, and not a clandestine operator, Brennan rose to prominence under Tenet and later served as the White House counterrorism adviser, before Obama appointed him to the top job at CIA.
While White House adviser, Brennan said in a 2012 speech, “enhanced interrogation techniques … are not needed to keep our country safe.” Yet he originally withdrew his name from consideration for the CIA post in 2008 when some liberal groups charged that he was deeply involved with the interrogation program. Brennan, however, has said he strongly opposed those techniques. Brennan had served as a campaign adviser to Obama that year and was in line for the CIA post until he withdrew . . .
read more: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2014/08/01/forcing-the-cia-to-admit-some-ugly-truths/
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