ToRTuRiNG JuSTiCe…

Those Who Can’t Be Nailed

CBS NEWS–After a review of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s full report, the Justice Department is not expected to initiate any criminal charges against any CIA officers who participated in or authorized the Retention, Detention and Interrogation (RDI) program.

This means the Justice Department is standing by its earlier decision not to pursue criminal charges.

Its investigators also reviewed the Committee’s full report and did not find any new information that they had not previously considered in reaching their determination.

The admissible evidence, the Justice Department concluded would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain convictions beyond a reasonable doubt.

He Who Can: If You Can’t Nail Him For What You Don’t Like, Nail Him For Something Else

HUFFINGTON POST–The Justice Department is unlikely to prosecute anyone connected to the brutal torture techniques outlined in a Senate report released on Tuesday, but the one man already sitting in jail in connection with the CIA’s interrogation program tried to draw public attention to it.

In an interview with ABC News in 2007, former CIA agent John Kiriakou was one of the first to acknowledge the existence of the CIA’s torture program. Federal authorities brought criminal charges against him in 2008 for revealing the name of a covert agent to a reporter.

Kiriakou pleaded guilty to those charges in 2012 and is currently serving a 30-month federal prison sentence.

“I believe I was prosecuted not for what I did but for who I am: a CIA officer who said torture was wrong and ineffective and went against the grain,” Kiriakou said last year.

Justice Served

BLOOMBERG VIEW–In short, then, the [DOJ’s Torture Memos] worked: The Department of Justice gave the CIA a free pass to torture without being punished. The legal analysis may have been wrong or morally monstrous, and the CIA appears to have lied to the Department of Justice. But even discounting the political factors that make it unlikely a president would prosecute the CIA, the legal ground for proceeding would be very rocky.

Serious crimes were committed. They’re going to go unpunished.

WB7

Is this farcical outcome surprising to anyone?

Can we expect this outcome to deter acts of government sanctioned torture in the future?

Well, I suppose we can now hold our breath waiting for those morally solvent Europeans, Poland for example, to carry the ball of justice…