State Department Official Freaks Out That Declassifying CIA Torture Report Might Make The World Angry (via Techdirt)
While the Senate Intelligence Committee voted to declassify its $40 million, 6,300 page report detailing the CIA’s torture regime — including the facts that it went beyond what was authorized, produced no useful intelligence and then the CIA lied about…
This post was republished using Repost. Please read it on Informed Comment directly: https://www.juancole.com/2014/04/department-official-declassifying.html
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I’m wondering if there is an inherent weakness with groups of any sort when it comes to recognizing their mistakes, learning, and doing what is appropriate to move on. Exhibit A being when the nominal leader says its better, in this case, to put it all “behind us.” Maintenance of legitimacy (e.g., the collective ego), is perhaps even more important than growth and more power, which remain imperatives as well. But nowhere in the group psyche is there any natural tendency or tolerance for significant correction, growth and transcendence, that individuals are at least capable of achieving.
It’s like once a group enter a collective they develop and become controlled by an ego which is self-reinforcing. It becomes stronger with size and is too distributed for there to be significant self-control, absent the entrance of an external (uncompromised) dictatorial force to direct change.
Puts a lot of faith in CIA to still shock the world. Reports of torture and abuse by CIA and US gov’t quite well known
can the ‘rule of law’ exist when we the people cannot know when, where, why our most fundamental laws are broken?
The Senate Committee wants the executive summary declassified now. Obama says he supports declassification. So, why the wait? Oh, right, everyone’s afraid of the CIA.
Declassify the report. We deserve to know the horrors that are committed in our name and on our dime, in the interests of mammoth corporations. Let the chips fall where they may. If intelligence people or diplomats from this country or any other are caught up in the dragnet and suffer from their involvement in criminal acts, that’s just tough. If we are ever to build ethical societies we will build them on the bones and the garbage dumps of our ugly past.
Well, everyone with an interest in the topic already knows a lot about the torture though perhaps there are some new even more repugnant and shocking details in the report but I figure the reason they’re desperate to keep the report classified is that that way there’s probably not even a slim chance that it can ever be used as evidence in a court. The idea that keeping the report classified will prevent some vaguely defined “danger” to America arising out of anger generated by the information in it becoming public is puerile.
Goldberg was referring to new info from a leak that Jason Leopold has just scooped on Al-Jazeera : Details Mitchell-Jensen personal roles in torture application; reveals Poland sought assurance the report would not mention it, new black site at Diego Rivera, etc. Read it all at
link to america.aljazeera.com