Senator: White House Simply Doesn't "Want Public to Know" Scope of CIA Torture

[Judi Lynn]

Published on Friday, November 21, 2014
by Common Dreams

Senator: White House Simply Doesn't "Want Public to Know" Scope of CIA Torture

Members of Intelligence Committee say White House is stalling release of torture report as high-level disagreement over what American people can know about abuses by CIA reaches boiling point; Transparency advocates tell lawmakers with access to report, 'Just read it into the record.'

by Jon Queally, staff writer


"The public has to know about it. They don’t want the public to know about it."

That's what Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) told the Huffington Post on Thursday night regarding continued White House stalling over release of a report that catalogs the internal investigation of CIA torture during the Bush years. The comments followed a close-door meeting between Senate Democrats and Obama administration officials that took place just hours before the president gave a much-anticipated speech on another subject, immigration reform.

Rockefeller said the torture report is "being slow-walked to death" by the administration and told the HuffPost, "They’re doing everything they can not to release it."

&quot The report) makes a lot of people who did really bad things look really bad," Rockefeller continued, "which is the only way not to repeat those mistakes in the future."

Though the report has been completed for many months, the members of the Senate Intelligence committee have been fighting with the White House, which allowed CIA officials to review its findings, over the scope of redactions to the report's summary before it's made public. Though the full report is not expected to be released to publicly, human rights and transparency advocates have urged members to simply enter the report into the public record, something they have legal authority to do, as a way to inform the American people, and the world, of the full scope of the tactics used by U.S. government agents during the earlier years of the so-called 'war on terror.'

More:
http://www.commondreams.org/news/2014/11/21/senator-white-house-simply-doesnt-want-public-know-scope-cia-torture

[Autumn]

1. Well golly gee.

Recommended.

[Jackpine Radical]

3. Rec #5

& K

[hollysmom]

2. I guess that

people who approve of torture won't blink an eye, but people who don't will be disgusted at how ugly Americans are. Heck I believe it already just because of how Americans don't blink an eye at what happens in the rest of the world but how dare anyone/thing/weather/? touch a single American. No compassion for the world, jsut for those you know - American can be changed to whites for a horrible amount of people.

[gordianot]

4. If anyone has any illusion about torture all you have to do is watch a variety of action movies

The American public should be as immune to torture as they are to on screen gun violence.

[Stryst]

12. Or look at our prison system

The casual horrors that go on in American prisons tell me how little the elite care for the masses.

[gordianot]

13. Good point, the horrors of the American penitentiary system are profound.

I recently toured the now closed Missouri State Penitentiary torture was routine the entire time it was open. It was considered one of the worst.

[bemildred]

14. +1. "In here, we make the rules ..." nt

[blkmusclmachine]

5. Far reaching and long standing. And pre-9/11, too.

[ReRe]

6. I want a couple Senators from that Senate Committee....

... to get a copy of that entire unredacted thing and start reading it into the record on the Senate floor. Read it word for word, no matter how long it takes.

[Enthusiast]

7. The bad guys torture. The bad guys like the Nazi Germans and the Imperial Japanese.

Torture makes us the bad guys. Bush and Cheney abandoned the moral high ground.

[Enthusiast]

8. K&R! This post should have hundreds of recommendations!

Thank you, Judi Lynn.

[bvar22]

9. Its a small club up there at the top,

& we ain't in it.
(thanks, George).

The Torture Cover-Up began for real in 2006 when Democrats won majorities in the House & Senate,
and and began participating in the Cover-Up to protect their Republican friends.
There is NO Opposition Party anymore.

Anyone (Democrat or Republican) assisting in the Cover-Up of War Crimes is an accessory/ Co-Conspirator.

[Jefferson23]

10. Recommend. n/t

[rhett o rick]

11. So how are the Pres Obama defenders trying to rationalize this? Seriously, what is the

WH rational for keeping this from the American public. Dear Pres Obama, where is the transparency you promised us?"

[bobthedrummer]

15. Studies in Intelligence: New Articles from the CIA's In-House Journal CIA Reactions to JFK Assassi-

nation (The National Security Archive/Electronic Briefing Book 493)

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB493

For JFK

[bobthedrummer]

17. bttt n/t

[yurbud]

16. Obama could continue his streak of good policy moves by releasing this and

the Saudi pages of the Joint Congressional Hearing into 9/11.

the latter would insure that no Republican could ever claim to be better on national security again, if their party and the corporate wing of the Democratic Party even survived the revelations.