Wednesday, December 10, 2014

Droning On (and On) About Torture

In response to the NatPo's front page story (including full-colour torture photos!) re DiFei's torture report, I sent this letter:
I can understand why the Senate Democrats would research and write a 500+ page report about CIA "torture" without interviewing anyone from the CIA. After all, had they gone to the trouble of eliciting the opinions of the intelligence community, including its thoughts on whether their desperate measures, employed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks when all was chaos and confusion, netted any useful information, the report might have been twice as long. And, in affording a more balanced perspective, it would not been nearly as effective in bludgeoning the previous administration, which some see as the real point of releasing the report at a time when the Democrats are set to cede control of the Senate to their Republican adversaries. 
As for the claim that the report was released to provide the American people with "transparency," that might fly if Obama's wasn't arguably the least transparent presidency in history, a regime whose litany of opacity includes "Fast and Furious," Obamacare, the Benghazi Debacle, the IRS scandal and many others. Also, while the Senate Democrats spent years and over $40 million assembling this document, not so much as a single penny has been set aside to investigate the hundreds if not thousands who have been killed by one of President Obama's drones. Can the Senate Democrats honestly say that had the drones come on stream during George W. Bush's watch, they would not have been probed up the wazoo by now? 
Purely for the sake of "transparency," of course.
Update: Sen. Bob Kerrey: Partisan torture report fails America

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