Yesterday, while House conservatives were voting for the 52nd time to deny health insurance to American working families, the Senate was up to something seemly more interesting-- and potentially more productive. After voting 61-35 for a cloture bill to shut down the Republican filibuster of legislation to extend unemployment benefits, the Senate Intelligence Committee voted, 11-3, to declassify parts-- the 400-page executive summary along with the conclusions and recommendations-- of its controversial report on the Bush-Cheney torture regime.
I'm pretty confident that the main points will be published. The 11-3 vote is an important signal, President Obama has ostentatiously put down his marker on declassification, and the power of the White House and the CIA over declassification is not absolute; it will be a negotiation, recall that the Intelligence Committee has unilateral declassification power which they won't use directly but can use as a threat so that they don't get completely rolled in the negotiations over redaction. What really matters most, I think, are the broad conclusions that the Washington Post has already reported: torture didn't produce important intelligence; the CIA lied to Congress, lied to the Justice Department, and lied to the White House, misleading those responsible for overseeing the CIA into thinking that intelligence that came from legal, traditional, standard FBI law enforcement interrogation methods actually came from torture, so that the CIA could keep torturing; the CIA went beyond even what the Bush White House had authorized and tried to hide evidence that it had done so. Here's where the "potential" modifier comes in:
The report will now be sent to the CIA for redactions before it is released to the public.All 7 Democrats, plus Maine Independent Angus King and 3 Republicans voted for the declassification of the report, including the ranking Republican on the committee, Saxby Chambliss of Georgia. The Surveillance State shills who voted against letting the American people see the report are torture-advocates Marco Rubio (R-FL), James Risch (R-ID) and Dan Coats (R-IN). Tom Coburn (R-OK), always the moral force, voted "present." Ron Wyden: "The American people will see that much of what CIA officials have said about the effectiveness of coercive interrogations was simply untrue."
Democratic senators on the committee say the report found that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration did not aid in tracking down Osama bin Laden.
The CIA has disputed that conclusion and other findings in the Senate’s report.
The controversial 6,300-page report has sparked a major feud between the CIA and the committee, with each side accusing the other of potentially breaking the law over an internal CIA review of the interrogation programs.
The dispute flew into the open last month when Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) accused the CIA of potentially violating the Constitution by searching her staffers’ computers… Feinstein said Thursday that she hopes the CIA will work through the report and get it released within 30 days, although she said that might be “wishful thinking.”
She said that she hoped the number of redactions would be minimal.
The alarming part of what the committee agreed to yesterday was that "the CIA, in consultation with other agencies, will conduct the declassification review." The CIA? The habitual deceivers that the report exposes as liars get to decide what gets redacted and what gets seen? What could go wrong? Why not just let Cheney make the decisions?
