Djelloul Marbrook - A sinister scenario lurks beneath the smoke-and-mirrors debate about the Senate report on CIA torture, a scenario which suggests the debate is a smokescreen to rescue elected officials at the highest levels from their moral responsibility for this national disgrace. We know (see story below) that the Bush-Cheney White House pressured the CIA to conclude that Iraq possessed and was developing weapons of mass destruction. We know that George Tenet, then CIA director, sucking up to the Bush-Cheney gang, assured them that the CIA could make a case for weapons of mass destruction. Why then should it be difficult to entertain the notion that the CIA was also pressured to torture prisoners? But the Senate report lays the blame squarely on the CIA, not elected leaders who may have corrupted it. Every agency, every bureau, every department of government has within it the seeds of corruption, officials who are willing to be corrupted, and just as surely every agemcy, bureau and department has civil servants who stand up to corruption.
There is justification for a strong suspicion that the Senate, the political and journalistic class are demonizing and scapegoating the CIA in order to absolve politicians at the highest levels of the Bush-Cheney and Obama-Biden administrations of moral responsibility for the torture of fellow human beings. If this is true, there must be thousands of demoralized and furious civil servants in the CIA who feel betrayed not only by their superiors but by the political class in general....
The press is blandly accepting the Senate version even though the Iraq experience has taught us irrefutably that the CIA was misused for political purposes. It stinks to high heaven, and yet it is more than likely that no one will raise this dark possibility on this morning yammer shows.
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