Humor from national security front for a late Friday afternoon: The Senate Intelligence Committee is to release 600 summary pages of its 6,300-page investigation of the CIA torture and interrogation program (which, hardly surprisingly, turns out to be brutal beyond even what was previously believed about it, ugly, and completely ineffective when it came to getting useful info out of prisoners). The report is reputedly highly critical of the CIA. Now, before those pages are released to the public, theres just one more step: they have to be vetted by the White House and -- heres the humor -- the CIA. Yes, it makes so much sense. Its about time as well that all investigative journalism is vetted by those who are being investigated before being published. I tell you, the national security world doesnt need Andy Borowitz or Tom Tomorrow, its officials are natural (self-)satirists on their own. Tom As Christopher Anders of the ACLU wrote recently: With the committee poised to vote to submit the torture report for a declassification review and then public release, it is worth asking: Will the Senate risk getting fooled by the CIA a third time? CIA Director John Brennan has promised to play nice, saying that if sent the Senate torture report yet again, the CIA would carry out the review expeditiously. Yes, lets again entrust the report to the agency that broke the law on torture and was so brazen that until this month, its acting CIA general counsel was a lawyer named 1,600 times in the torture report. Only a fool would be fooled three times... The CIA should never have had a torture program, never should have lied about what it was doing and never should have been given broad authority to review the Senate oversight report. Obama cannot now hand the agency a black-out pen to continue to hide the horrors it inflicted around the globe and the harm it caused to our American values. Its time for someone other than the CIA to decide what all Americans can know about its wrongs. cnn/2014/04/03/opinion/anders-cia-torture-report/
Posted on: Fri, 04 Apr 2014 20:40:06 +0000
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