QOTD: John Rizzo
by digby
Where’s Joseph Heller when you need him?
This is John Rizzo, former general counsel for the CIA kvetching about the torture report:
“Just because something is leaked doesn’t mean it’s still not secret. A national security secret is still a national security secret until the government says otherwise.”
Hookay. Evidently, we’re all just supposed to pretend we don’t know what we know because the government tells us we’re not supposed to know it.
Jesus H. Christ. These people are scary.
That quote is from this article revealing the details of the torture report “negotiations” in which Dianne Feinstein and the White House/CIA worked out what the American people are allowed to know about how their government tortures people and the foreign countries that help them do it.
The argument between the WH/CIA and the Senate Democrats is interesting, but this should be of interest as well:
The summary is expected to reignite the debate over whether the CIA’s coercive interrogation techniques in the first years of the war on terror amounted to torture. Although the summary report is said to not use the word “torture,” officials said it would describe practices that any layman would understand as torture.
“We tortured some folks,” President Barack Obama said in July. “We did some things that are contrary to our values.”
The heart of the substantive dispute between the two major parties is whether the harsh interrogation techniques that President Obama has called “torture” produced valuable intelligence that led to the capture of al-Qaeda operatives. Republicans, as well as former CIA director Leon Panetta and a former acting director, Mike Morrell, have said that it did.
Originally there had been bipartisan support for the majority staff’s investigation, and the committee’s Republican staff was initially part of the investigation — but it withdrew early in the process. Even after the Republican staff disowned the investigation, some Republican senators continued to support declassification, including John McCain and Lindsey Graham.
The committee’s release will include a written rebuttal from the CIA and a dissent from Republicans. That critique is expected to make the point that the Senate Democratic staffers who conducted the research never interviewed CIA officials for their report and make assessments that are contradicted by other classified information not included in the final public report.
Does anyone doubt that presidents will authorize torture in the future if the CIA tells them they need to do it? I don’t. It is no longer a taboo. It’s simply a matter of when it might be necessary. That’s what happens when you refuse to punish people for violating the taboo.
This afternoon, representatives of various groups delivered a petition with nearly 200,000 signatures to Senator Mark Udall’s office requesting that he enter the report into the congressional record.
.