After Todd Akin's recent diatribe - the one in which he trashed the CIA along with the rest of the "big government" bogeymen that worry him so much - we chided his fellow Republicans, including Kit Bond, for their inconsistency. Bond, if you remember, had gone ballistic when Nancy Pelosi asserted that the CIA had lied to the Congress, but seemed content to hold his peace about Rep. Akin's remarks.
Now it seems that perhaps Senator Bond might have learned something that led him to decide, however belatedly, that discretion really is the better part of valor. Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, has confirmed five instances in which the CIA lied to Congress since 2001, including the situation cited by Pelosi. Schakowsky is pretty unequivocal about what she expects from the Republicans who ganged up on Pelosi earlier:
Schakowsky was asked on MSNBC whether Republicans now owed Pelosi an apology. "I certainly think they do," she said.
Will Senator Bond be big enough to step up and offer a public apology? I don't know about you, but I'm not holding my breath.
Remember when Republicans got all worked up when Nancy Pelosi pointed out that the CIA might not have been totally on the up-and-up with Congress? Why, Media Matters asks, aren't they equally up in arms when their own Todd Akin belittles, in Kit Bond's words, our "terror fighters"?
Akin, tone-deaf as usual, is more than willing to sacrifice the CIA if he can get a dig in at "big government." He drags out all of the conservative whipping boys; although it is perhaps surprising that he is so willing to lump the CIA together with such standard, right-wing bugaboos as the Department of Education. But that's our boy Todd - always out on the edge of the fringe.
Unfortunately for Mr. Akin's credibility, he neglects to mention that almost all of the agencies he decries have served their functions pretty well over the years, and when they have failed, it is often due to failures elswehere in the government. For instance, many agencies owe their current decimated state to changes effected during the heyday of George Bush and his Republican congress, which included the very compliant Mr. Akin. One thing is sure: government won't work if those who are charged with making it work won't do the job.
Seems Kit Bond, in his best huffing and puffing style, has thrown a noisy little tantrum and resigned from the Senate Intelligence Committee panel charged with reviewing CIA Interrogation policies. He claims that the appointment of a federal prosecutor by Attorney General Eric Holder might bias the hearings and lead to a general unwillingness on the part of CIA officers to be forthcoming about their possible, past misdeeds:
"Had Mr. Holder honored the pledge made by the President to look forward, not backwards, we would still be active participants in the Committee's review," the ranking Republican on the intelligence panel, Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, said in a statement. "What current or former CIA employee would be willing to gamble his freedom by answering the Committee's questions? Indeed, forcing these terror fighters to make this choice is neither fair nor just."
Bond's resignation doesn't seem to bother panel chair, Dianne Feinstein, who has indicated that the panel will complete its task with or without bipartisan contributions. Perhaps one reason for her equanimity might be relief that she won't have to deal with the overt bias that Bond himself displays when he speaks about the temerity of the DOJ in investigating individuals whom he salutes as "terror fighters."
Bond might just be worried, good Republican soldier that he is, that when faced with hard evidence about what the CIA actually did, he could find himself in a very hard place. He himself might be forced to condemn his beloved terror fighters. Can't somebody please explain to the senator that there is a word for governments that allow secret intelligence agencies to run amok, and that word is "dictatorship"?
This 6-page white paper, published August 31, 2009, after the new release of the May 2004 CIA Inspector General's report, shows that the extent to which American doctors and psychologists violated human rights and betrayed the ethical standards of their professions by designing, implementing, and legitimizing a worldwide torture program is worse than previously known.
A team of PHR doctors authored the white paper, which details how the CIA relied on medical expertise to rationalize and carry out abusive and unlawful interrogations. It also refers to aggregate collection of data on detainees' reaction to interrogation methods. Physicians for Human Rights is concerned that this data collection and analysis may amount to human experimentation and calls for more investigation on this point. If confirmed, the development of a research protocol to assess and refine the use of the waterboard or other techniques would likely constitute a new, previously unknown category of ethical violations committed by CIA physicians and psychologists.
...In essence, the lawyers were asked if the techniques constituted torture and they replied to the CIA that they only did so if the CIA Office of Medical Services (OMS) informed them that the techniques reached the defined standard of pain. The OMS health professionals obligingly passed on through CIA channels their opinion that the pain was not in fact severe
In an egregious example of this circular process, one OLC memo concludes that waterboarding is not torture because "however frightening the experience may be, OMS personnel have informed us that the waterboard technique is not physically painful." Scores of similar references to OMS medical judgments about pain and the safeguarding effects of medical monitoring appear throughout the memos. Although OMS did express some concern about some techniques, those objections were limited. Without the cooperation of health professionals in making these assessments, the OLC memos could not have reached the conclusions they did and could not have so easily justified torture...
Except they aren't saying that. What is it about"...In the end, you and the Committee will have to determine whether this information is an accurate summary of what actually happened..." that Sarah Steelman doesn't quite understand?
Oh that's right, that's always way too much to ask of right wingnut political hacks.
A January 17 New York Times editorial noted that Attorney General designate Eric Holder testified at his nomination hearings that when it came to overhauling the nation's interrogation rules for both the military and the CIA, the Army Field Manual represented "a good start." The editorial noted the vagueness of Holder's statement. Left unsaid was the question, if the AFM is only a "good start," what comes next?
The Times editorial writer never bothered to mention the fact that three years earlier, a different New York Times article (12/14/2005) introduced a new controversy regarding the rewrite of the Army Field Manual. The rewrite was inspired by a proposal by Senator John McCain to limit U.S. military and CIA interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual. (McCain would later allow an exception for the CIA.)
According to the Times article, a new set of classified procedures proposed for the manual was "was pushing the limits on legal interrogation." Anonymous military sources called the procedures "a back-door effort" to undermine McCain's efforts at the time to change U.S. abusive interrogation techniques, and stop the torture.
A Forgotten Controversy
Over the next six months or so, a number of articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times described the course of the controversy. By mid-June 2006, the NYT was reporting that, under pressure from unnamed senior generals and members of Congress (including McCain, and Senators Warner and Graham), the Pentagon was rethinking its plan to have a classified annex to the AFM, which would include a different set of interrogation rules for "unlawful combatants," like the detainees at Guantanamo. Included in the discussion about these classified procedures were, reportedly, members of the State Department and various human rights organizations.
According to an article in the L.A. Times, this latest fight over the classified procedures went back at least to mid-May 2006. The manual itself had been written at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, roughly a year earlier, and then sent to the Pentagon for further evalution. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's right-hand man, Stephen Cambone, was put in charge of its final draft. According the L.A. Times article, members of Congress were "keen to avoid a public fight with the Pentagon." The announcement that the controversial and still unknown procedures might not be included in the manual was seen as a success by human rights groups.
Yet the proverbial chickens never hatched, and by early September 2006 the new Army Field Manual was finally released. The section on special interrogation procedures for "unlawful combatants" was included as a special appendix (Appendix M), and published in unclassified format. According to a L.A. Times story on September 8, Cambone was crowing that the new Army Field Manual instructions would give interrogators "what they need to do the job." The article noted:
The new manual includes one restricted technique that will only be used on so-called unlawful combatants - such as Al Qaeda suspects - not traditional prisoners of war.
That technique, called "separation," involves segregating a detainee from other prisoners. Military officials said separation was not the equivalent of solitary confinement and was consistent with Geneva Convention protections.
As for the proposed secrecy surrounding the new techniques, the Pentagon had decided it couldn't keep them secret forever. Senator Warner was also on record as against any classified annex to the manual.
Not long ago, I wrote about what was included in Appendix M, which purports to introduce the single technique of "separation." In fact, the Appendix M includes instructions regarding solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and, in combination with other procedures included in the Army Field Manual, amounted to a re-introduction of the psychological torture techniques practiced at Guantanamo, and taught by Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE psychologists and other personnel at the Cuban base and elsewhere.
The rewrite of the Army Field Manual included other seemingly minor changes. It introduced dubious procedures, such as the "False Flag" technique, wherein interrogators could pretend they were from another country. It also redefined the meaning of "Fear Up," a procedure meant to exploit a prisoner's existing fears under imprisonment. Now, interrogators could create "new" fears. The AFM rewrite was a masterpiece of subterfuge and double talk, which could only have been issued from the offices of Rumsfeld and Cambone.
One would think this turnaround of the Pentagon's position regarding a removal of these controversial procedures would have been a matter of some note. But there was no protest from Congress, no mention of the past controversy in the press, and only vague comments at first and then acceptance by human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Only Physicians for Human Rights protested the inclusion of the techniques listed in Appendix M. For the rest... silence.
"After much thought and a careful review of the record, I voted today to confirm the nomination of Representative Porter Goss to be Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (DCI). But I do have some serious concerns - especially about the impact of this nomination on intelligence reform and his record of partisanship in Congress.
I believe the President should have the prerogative to appoint who he wants to be the DCI, or for any other senior position, subject only to the requirement that the person be qualified for the job. As a former CIA officer, a former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and a former Army intelligence officer, I think he is certainly qualified. If he is confirmed, I would hope that he demonstrates the necessary independence required of the DCI. But there are still some open questions, which gave me some hesitancy in supporting the nomination...
[emphasis added]:
How's that "qualification" thing working out for you Senator Feinstein?:
