Obama’s Transparency Test

In his recent State of the Union address, President Obama vowed that when it came to counterterrorism in his second term, he would be “even more transparent to the American people and to the world.” That commitment is about to be tested. With Obama’s pick for C.I.A. Director, John Brennan, now all but assured of confirmation, his Administration needs to decide whether to push for the public release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s still-classified blockbuster report on C.I.A. wrongdoing during the Bush years. It’s hard to see how the Obama Administration can square its talk of transparency with any further cover-up of this ostensibly mammoth, comprehensive, and devastating report on the brutal interrogation and detention practices during those years.

Obama’s Justice Department has now agreed to share with the Intelligence Committee the remaining legal memos it had been keeping from the Senate, laying out its justifications for targeted drone strikes. While this is a step in the right direction, the release of the report—which is currently bottled up at the C.I.A. under review—remains a more serious challenge.

During his Senate confirmation hearings last month, Brennan acknowledged that the report’s three-hundred-page summary had shattered his earlier belief that the Bush Administration’s resort to what were euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” had worked. Brennan had claimed publicly in 2007 that the C.I.A.’s treatment of terror suspects had produced valuable intelligence, and perhaps even saved lives. But after reading the report, Brennan acknowledged under oath that he now doubts this.

In response to a question from Saxby Chambliss, the Republican vice-chairman of the Intelligence Committee, Brennan said, “I must tell you, Senator, that reading this report from the committee raises questions about the information that I was given at the time, the impression I had at the time.”

If the report is so significant that it changed the mind of someone as experienced as Brennan, a longtime intelligence veteran who was chief of staff to the C.I.A. Director when the most brutal interrogation tactics were being employed, and who is now about to lead the agency, shouldn’t the rest of the country, to say nothing of those involved in national-security decisions, know what’s in it? Isn’t learning from past mistakes the point of documenting them?

For four years, a handful of staffers for the Senate Intelligence Committee have been performing the essence of oversight, as required by the law. As such, they have been proxies for the public. Working often seven days a week in catacomb-like basement offices, they have culled through some six million pages of nearly indecipherable internal intelligence documents in search of the truth. From this research, they have compiled a six-thousand-plus-page report with something like thirty-five thousand footnotes. To make it more digestible, they have boiled this down to the three-hundred-page summary cited by Brennan. Yet it’s unclear if even in this abbreviated form, it will ever see the light of day.

After a majority of the Senate Intelligence Committee voted last December 13th to approve the report, with most but not all Republican committee members opposing it, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman, sent it to the C.I.A. for comment. Why the C.I.A. should be in the position of editing and potentially censoring an independent critique of its wrongdoing is unclear. But at any rate, Feinstein told the agency it had sixty days to get back to her with its response, which presumably included its suggested edits of material too sensitive to release. That deadline has now passed. Whether Brennan will revive the process is unknown. Brennan sidestepped any commitment to release the report during his confirmation hearings, and President Obama has so far not addressed the issue. Without support from the Administration, Feinstein is left out on a limb.

Brennan’s careful choice of words in describing what he learned from the report underscores the urgency of it reaching a broader audience. He specifically singled out the unreliability of “the information I was given at the time” as the reason for changing his mind now. Piecing that comment together with other public statements made by several of the senators who have also read the report, what emerges is the strong suggestion that the report did not just uncover cruel and unjustifiable interrogation and detention practices by the C.I.A. but, perhaps more significantly, it revealed a pattern of misrepresentation by agency officials, who appear to have misled the White House, Justice Department, and Senate about the efficacy of their clandestine programs.

Senator Ron Wyden, for instance, released a statement saying the report found that “the C.I.A. repeatedly provided inaccurate information about its interrogation program to the White House, the Justice Department, and Congress.”

Similarly, during the Brennan confirmation hearings, Colorado’s Senator Mark Udall stressed, “Inaccurate information on the management operation and effectiveness of the C.I.A.’s detention-interrogation program was provided by the C.I.A. to the White House, the D.O.J., Congress, and the public. Some of this information is regularly and publicly repeated today by former C.I.A. officials, either knowingly or unknowingly. And although we now know this information is incorrect, the accurate information remains classified, while inaccurate information has been declassified and regularly repeated.”

And the usually mild-mannered Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia, slammed those running “this detention interrogation program” as “ignorant of the topic, [it was] executed by personnel without relevant experience, managed incompetently by senior officials who did not pay attention to details, and corrupted by personnel with pecuniary conflicts of interest.”

If so, the report is not just ancient history but a vital, cautionary lesson about relying blindly on the C.I.A. to assess the value of its own intelligence gathering—a lesson that Obama, and all presidents, would be foolish not to heed.

And yet there is no indication that Obama has read the report or even its summary. Nor is there any indication that his National Security Council staff has any interest in the study. Obama has said that when it comes to the issue of torture during the Bush years, he prefers to “turn the page.” He’s pointed out that his Administration has banned “enhanced interrogation techniques” by executive order, but another Administration can just as easily re-authorize them. Without access to this meticulous, tragic, and available history, what’s to stop the country from repeating it? Before turning the page, the President might do well to make sure he, and the rest of us, can read it.

Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Jane Mayer