We begin with Ryan Cooper's analysis at The Week on the upcoming release of a Senate report on the use of torture after 9/11:
A Senate report denouncing the CIA's torture program in the years after 9/11 is reportedly going to be released this week, after years of delay. Naturally, this has prompted a last-ditch effort from the orchestrators of the program to prevent damage to their reputations, including a rare TV appearance from George W. Bush.
These people should all be jeered and pelted with rotten fruit.
There is simply no reason to trust them, and every reason to think they are either lying to themselves or the public. The torture report should be released immediately.
Dan Froomkin has a list of key facts to keep in mind:
Should something emerge, here are some important caveats to keep in mind:
1) You're not actually reading the torture report. You're just reading an executive summary. The full Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA's interrogation and detention program 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.
Massimo Calabresi at TIME:
The report will contain new details about the “brutality” of the EIT program, says a senior Senate aide. The first thing to look at will be these details. Previous government reports have shown how the approved techniques—waterboarding, sleep deprivation, “walling”, among others—were actually implemented. But the Senate staff had access to over 6.2 million pages of operational cables, internal emails, memos and other documents from the CIA. That means Senate Democrats saw pretty much everything—good, bad and ugly—that was ever written by the CIA on the program and what happened in the rooms where it was implemented.
Democrats, including some who approved the EIT program, will say they never thought it would be implemented in such a brutal way. Those involved in the program will argue the excesses are exaggerated, and that Democrats signed off on everything. The Obama administration’s CIA will try to find a safe middle ground.
Much more on the day's top stories below the fold.
ACLU has a list of memos and other materials to read before the report's release.
The ACLU's Executive Director Anthony D. Romero, meanwhile, argues for explicit pardons that acknowledge the crime:
[L]et’s face it: Mr. Obama is not inclined to pursue prosecutions — no matter how great the outrage, at home or abroad, over the disclosures — because of the political fallout. He should therefore take ownership of this decision. He should acknowledge that the country’s most senior officials authorized conduct that violated fundamental laws, and compromised our standing in the world as well as our security. If the choice is between a tacit pardon and a formal one, a formal one is better. An explicit pardon would lay down a marker, signaling to those considering torture in the future that they could be prosecuted.
The spectacle of the president’s granting pardons to torturers still makes my stomach turn. But doing so may be the only way to ensure that the American government never tortures again. Pardons would make clear that crimes were committed; that the individuals who authorized and committed torture were indeed criminals; and that future architects and perpetrators of torture should beware. Prosecutions would be preferable, but pardons may be the only viable and lasting way to close the Pandora’s box of torture once and for all.
Simon Malloy:
What’s most baffling about these delays is that the report itself isn’t exactly going to break some huge scandal. For the most part, we already know what it’s going to say: the CIA tortured terrorism suspects, and the interrogations did not produce any valuable intelligence that couldn’t have been extracted through conventional interrogation. The report’s value lies in the statement it makes about the government’s willingness to acknowledge its failures. “The point of the Senate report is not to blow the CIA torture program wide open,” The Week’s Ryan Cooper wrote in August. “It is to confront that disgraceful era in an official manner and to restore some decency to the nation.”
There has been no accountability for the elected officials who trampled over the public trust by authorizing the use of torture. There has been no accountability for the political appointees who did violence upon the Constitution in order to manufacture something resembling a legal justification for torture. There has been no accountability for the people tasked with administering the torture. The entire process has been one big exercise in dodging consequences.
Paul Waldman:
Rep. Mike Rogers, the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, has been all over television (see here or here) warning that “This will in fact incite violence and it’s likely to cost someone their life.”
The problem is that that fear will never disappear. Just as thirteen years ago they used the public’s fear to justify the use of torture in the first place, today they try to create fear as a justification for keeping the truth secret. But whether we learn the full extent of the torture program this week, this year, or this decade, there will probably be a price to pay. Those who argue for delay ought to have the courage to admit that by their logic, the report should be quashed forever.
Might there be some violence in response to the information contained in the report? Yes, there might. When the truth is ugly, revealing it has a cost.
Jay Bookman:
Quibble all you want, but we tortured people, probably a lot of them, brutally and over a long period of time. Some of those we tortured were probably completely innocent, and we probably killed a few in the process, although the soon-to-be released report from the Senate Intelligence Committee will provide more details on all that and more.[...]
“Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors,” Major Gen. Antonio Taguba wrote, concluding that “the only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”
That was in 2008, and it is only now, six years later, that we are getting anything close to a public accounting of what happened.