Calling Senate Intelligence Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein and her Democratic committee’s "torture report" partisan isn’t an insult, it’s a simple fact, according to
Politico writer Rich Lowry in an article entitle "Dianne Feinstein’s Travesty."
The report, released Tuesday, indicated that the CIA ran a "deeply flawed" and poorly supervised program. Agency leadership, according to the report, concealed from the Bush administration the brutality of what was taking place.
It concluded that the CIA’s methods did not produce life-saving information that could not have been gleaned otherwise.
Not so, according to Lowry. The committee opted not to include any information that didn’t comport with its pre-established narrative.
"The reality is that the committee didn’t want to include anything that might significantly complicate its cartoonish depiction of a CIA that misled everyone so it could maintain a secret prison system for the hell of it," he writes.
The interrogation program "was born against the backdrop" of 9/11, when Americans lived in fear and dread of another attack, bolstered by articles like one that ran in the New York Times in May 2002 that read "there has been a drumbeat of warnings from top officials that further terrorist attacks, even a nuclear one, are all but inevitable," according to Lowry.
Yet Feinstein’s report makes no mention of the climate of fear that had permeated the nation, making it seem as though the CIA capriciously made the decision to launch a torture program.
He points to "the impeccably liberal Jay Rockefeller, vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee," who after the 2003 capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told CNN that "we should 'very, very tough with him' … that he has information that will save American lives and that 'we have no business not getting that information' and that we should consider shipping him to a country with no laws against torture.
"I wouldn’t take anything off the table where he is concerned, because this is a man who has killed hundreds and hundreds of Americans over the last 10 years," Rockefeller said.
The all-Democrat committee that conducted the investigation "portrays Gen. (Michael) Hayden, the former CIA director, as a liar who deceived Congress about the agency’s interrogation program, yet the committee couldn’t be bothered to interview him."
The committee didn’t bother to interview anyone, according to Lowry.
Feinstein’s said that because of Justice Department investigations into those responsible for the interrogation program, the committee could not interview them. But Lowry points out that those investigations ended years ago.
Republicans stopped cooperating with the inquiry long ago, when it became clear that "Feinstein wanted a prosecutor’s brief, not a report tainted by any hint of fair-minded inquiry."
He gave the report props for its finding that the interrogation program lacked adequate control, especially at the beginning, "that it went too far and that the agency became too invested — not unexpectedly, given normal bureaucratic imperatives — in defending it."
But to suggest that the thousands of reports that resulted from the interrogations were useless and produced no actionable intelligence is counterintuitive, according to Lowry, who points to the report’s conclusion that "terrorists lied when subjected to coercive interrogations."
"Of course, terrorists also lied when they weren’t subjected to coercive interrogations," he said.
He challenges the report’s assertion that the harsh interrogation of Abu Zubaydah didn’t help lead to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, though Republicans contend that "There is considerable evidence that the information Abu Zubaydah provided identifying KSM as ‘Mukhtar’ and the mastermind of 9/11 was significant to CIA analysts, operators, and FBI interrogators."
"The Feinstein report pooh-poohs the notion that the interrogations helped put the CIA onto bin Laden’s courier, in part because the agency had information about him prior to its interrogations," Lowry writes. "But the interrogations highlighted the importance of the information already in the CIA’s possession."
CIA Director John Brennan countered that the agency strongly disagrees with the Feinstein report’s finding,
CNN reported.
"Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees (subject to enhanced interrogation) did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives," he said. "The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al Qaeda continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day."
According to Lowry, the overarching theme of Feinstein’s report is that "we would have been just fine and achieved the same results in the war on terror with less information, rather than more.
"Not only does that defy common sense, it is a bet no one would have been willing to make in 2002."