If people knew the details of what [the CIA] actually did to hack into the Senate computers to go search for the torture document, jaws would drop. It’s straight out of a movie. —US Senate ‘source’
The cover-up of the CIA’s secret surveillance on the US Senate Intelligence Committee is only getting deeper. As the Huffington Post’s Ali Watkins and Ryan Grim reported on Tuesday afternoon, a still-classified Inspector General report alleges CIA officials “impersonated Senate staffers in order to gain access to Senate communications and drafts of the Intelligence Committee investigation” while Senate staffers were completing their now infamous – but still somehow unreleased – report on the CIA’s Bush-era torture program.
You would think the White House might be aghast at such revelations, given that it’s the Senate Intelligence Committee’s job to oversee the CIA. But instead of worrying about the Constitution or legal violations, all the Obama administration seems to care about is saving CIA director John Brennan’s ass. There have already been multiple calls for Brennan to resign since he lied to the public about spying on the Senate. And now the White House seems intent on siding with the CIA director beyond all reason.
The intel committee voted to release of some of its 6,000-page report way back in April, and we still have no idea when the public will learn the full truth about Abu Ghraib, the secret rendition facilities, and all the rest of the Bush atrocities – despite repeated assurances that we will. The release date has gone from July, to August, to September, and now to the end of October, thanks to foot-dragging and obfuscation from Langley to Pennsylvania Avenue. Anyone who thinks Obama’s White House is going to let this thing into the wild between the midterm elections and Isis Fever has got to be kidding themselves.
The Huffington Post reported that White House chief of staff Denis McDonough is deeply involved in negotiating the report’s eventual release, and has “pleaded with key Senate figures not to go after CIA Director John Brennan in the expected furor that would follow the [torture report’s] release.” And this is after Brennan blatantly lied to the press about the CIA spying on the committee, and even refused to tell lawmakers who at the CIA was responsible.
The CIA, for its part, is content for the truth to be withheld as long as possible. The agency redacted the report so much that it reportedly is incomprehensible, now they’re fighting with the Senate over what can and can’t be released. The ACLU and journalist Jason Leopold have been suing the CIA for the full report, but the agency has been telling them for months – unbelievably – that they didn’t even have a copy of it. Turns out it was unbelievable: we found out last week they had it all along.
Obama’s White House has insisted from the outset that they wants the report released, but behind the scenes, evidence points to the opposite. Former CIA chief Leon Panetta wrote in his new memoir that then-White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel berated him on behalf of Obama in 2009 for giving the Senate access to CIA records it is supposed to investigate:
The president wants to know who the fuck authorized this release to the committees. I have a president with his hair on fire and I want to know what the fuck you did to fuck this up so bad!
The man who put Obama’s “hair on fire”? Panetta reportedly infers it was, of course, John Brennan – the life-long spy who supported torture during the Bush administration, only to become the architect of the drone “kill list” for Obama, before somehow getting promoted to CIA director.
As Andrew Sullivan wrote in a blistering post on Monday, “The very fact that Brennan is still in his job – after displaying utter contempt for the Constitution and the American people – tells you all you really need to know about where Obama really stands on this question.”
At this point, it’s becoming hard to believe anything Obama says about torture. The New York Times’ Charlie Savage reported Sunday that this administration is considering reinstating the Bush administration’s absurd interpretation of the United Nations treaty against torture, signed by the US decades ago, so that the US can claim the UN actually meant that any torture happening outside one’s own country essentially, you know, doesn’t count. Military and intelligence lawyers “say they need more time to study whether it would have operational impacts.” Really? I thought we stopped torturing people five years ago.
If Obama were to adopt this radical interpretation, sure, it would contradict all of his promises as he came into office, but as legal professor David Lubon describes, it would also directly violate US law.
But the law has never bothered US government officials when it comes to torture. You can guarantee that they’ll continue to cajole and commandeer, every chance they get. If Obama ultimately rejects the intelligence agencies this time, the spies will just try again next administration – whether it’s on Hillary Clinton’s watch or even Rand Paul’s. Because who cares? The Justice Department has already refused to prosecute American torturers anyway. And even the Most Transparent Administration in History™ is very adept at arguing for extreme secrecy on the photos of torture at Abu Gharib, or the videos of force-feeding at Guantanamo, or a dozen other cases they’re fighting.
Next month, the UN will convene in Geneva to review US compliance with its landmark anti-torture treaty. As the transparency group Open the Government has documented, there’s a good argument the US is already in violation of it by withholding the torture report. If the Obama administration takes the advice of its intelligence lawyers, it will have slunk fully back to the dark side, back where America has promised one too many times to never go again.