Torture and the CIA

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Senate CIA report sheds light on Washington - link

So it seems that some pretty nasty stuff was done and that it didn't lead to the desired information.

Do you think there will be some sort of internal investigation within the US government?

The CIA has interrogated people with pain, drugs, and intimidation for decades. I can't say I'm shocked by the "revelations". What isn't even being mentioned is the practice of flying detainees to allied countries with advanced secret police, like Turkey, for "advanced interrogation". Nobody cares about that, because it isn't Americans doing the torturing.

What shocks me is the complete lack of oversight, and carte blanche that the CIA has. Our government was built with checks and balances for precisely this reason. I read that President Bush was only given a partial briefing four years after these events took place, and expressed misgivings about them. I am feeling much more sympathetic with Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange.

There's a term for that used by the executive branch and the intelligence community: plausible deniability. When something is so terrible, they can simply instruct underlings "not to let them know," so they can claim ignorance and hang underlings out to dry after being caught. Bush Jr, being the son of an old CIA boss like his dad, doubtlessly had been raised with the plausible deniability excuse all his life.

I don't think the they did anything wrong. Quite the contrary. Dick Cheney says the report is a full of crap. Maybe they need to investigate those who wrote the report for undermining the reputation of the agency?

dont think there will be much investigation, or that much change, only cosmetic changes. election is coming up is why the president said it'll stop.

I dont mind the terrorists being tortured, but there have been innocent people among them. they should check before locking up innocent people, and certainly check before torturing an innocent person. they can shoot the terrorists for all I care.

wasnt it the cia that did those experiments with electric shocks on mental patients or something? federal agencies such as this dont have any scruples hurting innocent people, and this goes for all federal agencies globwide, not just the US. something universal.

Who?

With torture, it's not so much what was done to captured enemies, but what it does to us as Americans. We as a country have always prided ourselves for our national values - which among other things means we don't stoop as low as others to torture. But the Bush administration had decided to throw away that aspect of American exceptionalism. Lest it be forgotten, we had prosecuted and hanged German and Japanese war criminals for doing much the same after WWII. Now the rest of the world can say that our claims to such high values is hollow - and they would be right.

I wouldn't trust a single word out of Cheney's yap. And the CIA, as they have a long, darkly immoral history which includes assassination (including the possibility of complicity in the murder of an American President - no, that isn't entirely just a loony conspiracy theory), support of anti-democratic governments, suppression of liberty, selling crack in the inner cities to support the Contra army, etc, hardly has a reputation worth defending.
And yes, what was done was wrong. Both practically - in that torture doesn't elicit reliable intel, and morally - we betray our national values that we hold ourselves and our government to a higher standard than other countries.

We don't have all the details. "There are known unknowns," someone once said. It turned out he was right.

That was Rumsfeld, and he was just as full of sh*t as Cheney.

You're making noise from within the protective bubble blown by the very people you criticize. Funny.

which protective bubble (blown by the very people you critize) other then foxnews/cnn etc?
it looks like a red herring, the way you put it here

No protective bubble. Cheney, Rumsfeld, the CIA, and their boss Bush Jr. had put us all in jeopardy with their abhorrent torture policies - I only wish we Americans had a protective bubble now to protect us now that our enemies figure they have the moral high ground.

Which enemies are you referring to?

People who aren't terrorists that are in the wrong place at the wrong time...though innocent is a strong word not sure anyone is innocent past the age of 5, perhaps innocent of crimes though. According to a lovely article I was reading, would have maybe liked less detail some that where found out not to be 'terrorists' or have any useful information about any terrorism they planned to keep imprisoned for 'the rest of their lives'....Maybe it was a total BS article, maybe it wasn't who knows disturbing though.