No, none of the Senate’s
6,000-page report on torture and brutal interrogation techniques
performed by the CIA during the War on Terror has been
declassified yet. But we know how the White House is going to
respond and what kind of questions they think the media is going to
ask because somebody accidentally (or perhaps “accidentally”)
leaked a four-page memo to an Associated Press reporter.
Because the memo is designed to help the White House prepare for
what it sees as the likely big questions, it essentially allows the
reader to extrapolate the major points that are going to be coming
out of the report, and that’s exactly what the
Associated Press did. At this point, much of the most important
findings of the full report barely counts as a secret. Anybody who
has read any stories about the Senate’s preparation of this report
(and their
fight with the CIA over it) knows that the Senate has concluded
that torture (regardless of whether the exact word is used) of
detainees took place and that it didn’t help the United States
fight terrorism.
But what is new is that apparently then-Secretary of State Colin
Powell and some U.S. ambassadors were kept in the dark about the
CIA’s actions, and some ambassadors who knew about the
interrogations at overseas black sites were told not to inform
their superiors at the State Department.
The memo is just one page of talking points and three pages of
predictions on the type of questions they think media will ask. The
White House seems to think the media is going to ask a lot of
questions about why the release of the report is even happening:
“Isn’t the release of this report endangering American citizens
overseas?”; “Did the White House ask Chairman Feinstein to delay
release of the report? Why not?”; “Is the Administration further
undermining our moral authority?”; “Isn’t the release of this
report going to destroy our intelligence relationships?” (Answer:
Too late); and the
hilarious “Isn’t this the worst possible time to release this
report in terms of unrest in the Middle East and other places where
our people are at risk?” Yes, let’s fix all that first! To be fair,
though, they do also predict questions about whether the government
is admitting that torture actually happened and whether the
Department of Justice revisit the decision not to prosecute
anybody.
The talking points themselves are of the predictable “Mistakes
were made” and “We don’t do this anymore” variety. Possibly the
most amusingly cynical talking point, which the Associated Press
noticed and decided to include in their story, is this one:
“This report tells a story of which no American is proud. But it
is also part of another story of which we can be proud. America’s
democratic system worked just as it was designed to work in
bringing an end to actions inconsistent with our democratic
values.”
Yeah, our treatment of prisoners was terrible, absolutely
reprehensible. But the outrage helped certain people get elected!
To be fair, it probably helped save us from a President Rudy
Giuliani.
Read the memo here.
from Hit & Run http://ift.tt/1m1dEvd
via IFTTT