By Ben Mathis-Lilley
On Twitter, CNN anchor Jake Tapper points to a viewpoint on the Senate Intelligence Committee (SSCI)'s CIA torture report
that's somewhere between, or perhaps outside of, the condemnations and
defenses of the "enhanced interrogation" program that have been flying
back and forth since the report was released. It's a blog post written
by a historian and former National Security Agency employee named John
Schindler, who believes that the United States should never use torture
as an interrogation method and that the CIA's detainee program was "a
disaster"—but also that the release of the Senate report is a major
mistake.
You should read the whole post here,
but to summarize, Schindler argues that releasing the report without
bipartisan backing guarantees that Republicans will oppose (necessary)
CIA reforms, that a great deal of information about the agency's
malfeasance had already been made known to the public (and was perhaps
even approved by Congress itself), that releasing the details of the
United States' cooperation with foreign intelligence services will make
them less likely to cooperate with us in the future, and that open
partisan condemnation will encourage the CIA's most cautious,
self-protecting impulses. Basically: nothing constructive is being
accomplished that would justify the damage that's being done.
Thus will CIA remain, largely unreformed. Its foreign partnerships have taken a serious blow, and any operational bias for action, strongly encouraged after 9/11, has evaporated, perhaps for decades. Who, after all, wants to take risks when you might be exposed by an angry Congress a few years down the road? Getting your intelligence services to be risk-averse and ineffective, acting like a very secretive and expensive Department of Motor Vehicles, is an eminently achievable goal, and will be the lasting legacy of the Democrats on the SSCI.
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