12 Things to Keep in Mind When You Read the Torture Report
12 Things to Keep in Mind When You Read the Torture Report
By Dan Froomkin @froomkin
1) You’re not actually reading the torture report. You’re just reading an executive summary. The full Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture of detainees runs upward of 6,000 pages. The executive summary is 480 pages. So you’re missing more than 80 percent of it.
2) The CIA got to cut out parts. The summary has been redacted – ostensibly by the White House, but in practice by officials of the CIA, which, lest we forget, is the agency that is being investigated, that spied on and tried to intimidate the people conducting the investigation, and whose director has engaged in serial deception about the investigation. The original redactions proposed by the White House included eliminating even the use of pseudonyms to let readers keep track of major recurring characters, and appeared intended to make the summary unintelligible.
3) Senate Democrats had their backs to the wall. Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein faced enormous pressure to get the summary out in some form, before the incoming Republican Senate majority could do the White House a solid and squelch it completely.
4) The investigation was extremely narrow in its focus. Committee staffers only looked at what the CIA did in its black sites; whether it misled other officials; and whether it complied with orders. That is somewhat like investigating whether a hit man did the job efficiently and cleaned up nicely.
More:
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/12/02/x-things-keep-mind-ever-get-read-torture-report/
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