Along with previously unknown examples of detainee torture and abuse by the CIA, there’s also overwhelming evidence of rampant misinformation if not outright deception about the torture program on the part of the agency.

Afrasianet - By Reed Richardson - After several years and numerous bureaucratic roadblocks, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence finally published a—shortened, partially redacted—report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the years after 9/11.
Though it amounts to less than 20 percent of the actual 6,000-page investigation, the 528-page executive summary still presents an exhaustive, damning indictment of our democracy sacrificing its principles.
Along with previously unknown examples of detainee torture and abuse by the CIA, there’s also overwhelming evidence of rampant misinformation if not outright deception about the torture program on the part of the agency. No doubt, the actions the report describes, done in our name, will forever be a stain our country’s legacy.
Nevertheless, as laudable as this report is in terms of transparency, it is still severely compromised in terms of actual accountability.
With no real examination of the culpability of the Bush White House in crafting the torture policy and no political will to prosecute the outrageous wrongdoing of those who carried it out, there’s little actual precedent here to dissuade future (or current) administrations from the same flawed, moral calculus on torture’s acceptability.
But the Senate probe’s narrow, self-limiting scope and the Obama administration’s half-hearted commitment to justice, respectively, aren’t the only things to blame for this. The establishment media has also played a key role in undermining even this feeble attempt at reckoning with our torture era.
It’s done this by once again letting the architects and apologists for the CIA’s torture program redefine the issue into a contrived “debate” about its efficacy.
This has been the right-wing’s modus operandi for years—co-opt the press into ignoring the universal moral repugnance of torture in favor of a narrow, Machiavellian parsing of whether or not it produces actionable intelligence.
Admittedly, the latter argument is much more comfortable terrain for the media, since it offers a convenient neutral ground from which to report (i.e., “senior administration officials say torture works, critics say it doesn’t…”).
This wishy-washy “both sides” stance does little for readers even when discussing mundane policy debates, but it does a real disservice to the public when the subject matter involves defining down a supposedly bedrock American principle via rhetorical dissembling.
In fact, pretty much since its existence was revealed the CIA’s interrogation and detention program has enjoyed broad support inside the Beltway.
Pushback from an incurious and submissive Washington press corps was notably rare when Bush was in office; many just dutifully repeated his unsubstantiated claims while adopting his administration’s Orwellian euphemism for the word torture. (To be fair, a few intrepid national security reporters did a commendable job in puncturing the veil of secrecy and learning the truth.)
And to this day, the DC media establishment still serves up an all-you-can-stomach buffet of moral relativism, obsessive fear-mongering, and, courtesy of Fox News, good old-fashioned American jingoism.
One of the loudest of these Beltway cheerleaders, though, has been former Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen.
Over the past few years, he has essentially gone all in on torture, writing a fawning book on the CIA’s interrogation program and occasionally stepping into the Post’s op-ed breach whenever he felt the need to push what are, in fact, inaccurate anecdotes about thwarted terror plots. Naturally, the publication of a massively detailed investigation into the CIA’s torture program—one that would seriously threaten his worldview—set him off.
And so, there was Thiessen on the eve of the Senate report’s release this week, pre-emptively attacking the report and defending the CIA with a new Post column about how waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammad led the CIA to target Adnan el Shukrijumah, an Al Qaeda commander (who happened to be killed just this past weekend by Pakistani forces).
It almost goes without saying, but, yes, Thiessen’s argument falls apart in the face of the SSCI report’s actual findings on Shukrijumah, which start on page 358.
OK, this kind of pushback was to be expected. Normalizing torture has literally been Thiessen’s meal ticket, and he conveniently occupies one of several Post columnist slots apparently reserved for former Bush staffers.
But he was by no means alone in his campaign. In fact, as the SSCI report’s release drew nigh, a critical mass of former CIA and top-level Bush administration officials suddenly re-emerged across the media landscape.
Many of the same names the country learned not to trust thanks to little things like chimerical WMD evidence and the disastrous Iraq War got a warm welcome back to the mainstream media’s op-ed pages and news shows to defend the agency’s torture program. (Torture and the Iraq War are not unrelated.)
Indeed, everyone, was rallying ’round the CIA’s waterboards, it seemed.
There was George Bush, on CNN; Dick Cheney, in The New York Times; the CIA officer who destroyed the videotapes of agency torture, in The Washington Post; and don’t forget former CIA director Michael Hayden, in The Wall Street Journal and on Morning Joe and on Face the Nation and on NBC Nightly News and probably on a random street corner in Washington right this minute, hectoring passersby about how our nation’s security necessitated odious things like rectal feeding.
The latter’s all-out enthusiasm for rebutting the Senate report finally made perfect sense once you saw its 37-page Appendix 3, which was solely dedicated to cataloguing the many times Hayden lied to Congress
In this era of instant oppo research, it wasn’t a great shock to learn that these torture apologists even started their own, clumsily-named rebuttal website: CIASavedLives.com.
But after perusing the site, where it lists the dozens of media platforms these folks have graced in the past few days to attack the report, you have to wonder why they bothered. With a compliant media seeking narrative “balance,” they’ve certainly had no trouble finding opportunities to amplify their counter-programming.
That the press would end up enabling these attacks on the torture report isn’t that unexpected, sadly.
That’s because the Senate report found the media was an all too willing conduit for a CIA propaganda campaign back when the torture program was active.
Whether it was selectively leaking classified info to gin up sympathy for the agency or feeding the media made-up terror plots to justify the inhumane treatment of the detainees, the CIA clearly played the mainstream press.
And the mainstream press mostly played along, whether by passing along inaccurate claims of torture’s success or repeating false chronologies to support those claims. (Two specific examples of this cited in the Senate’s report involve The New York Times and Dateline NBC.) At times, the media acted more like an extension of the agency’s Office of Public Affairs than a watchdog of the government.
Not surprisingly, these embarrassing revelations didn’t get much airtime within the mainstream media itself. CNN’s “top takeaways” from the torture report, for example, completely ignored the press’s often subservient relationship with the CIA.
But to dwell merely on the unspeakable horrors inflicted upon detainees—many of whom were totally innocent—by our government is to miss the other half of the torture story.
That’s the half that more directly impacts our democracy going forward, since the Senate’s report also lays bare just how corrupt and broken our system of oversight and transparency is.
When CIA officials can privately speak of the “Glomar figleaf” they used to uniformly stonewall every FOIA request and when they can joke to one another about the hypocrisy of proclaiming everything a state secret while simultaneously “planning to reveal darn near the entire [torture] program” to friendly reporters, it’s clear there’s bad faith on top of immoral policy.
Recognizing this matters. A lot. Because there’s no duty on the part of the press to tell both sides of the story if one side is merely trying to enlist the press into spreading lies and misinformation on its behalf.
To be complicit in these torture apologist’s propaganda efforts even after their deceit has been revealed transcends run-of-the-mill false equivalence; it’s tantamount to journalistic malpractice.
That’s why any self-congratulation over what is, at best, a piecemeal attempt at reconciling our nation’s recent torture regime should be avoided.
We’ve put no real, lasting mechanisms in place to prevent it from happening again precisely because we haven’t fully learned the painful lessons of how it happened the first time.
One interesting solution came from ACLU Director Anthony Romero, who argued in a New York Times editorial that Obama should pre-emptively pardon everyone involved in approving and executing the CIA’s torture program—including former President Bush—as a way to emphasize torture's illegality.
Of course, such a move would unleash a vitriolic outpouring of right-wing outrage so intense it would make impeachment hearings look like a Sunday picnic.
What’s more, the idea would be a non-starter with a president whose one-way vision of justice only looks forward and not backward.
But, as a thought experiment, it’s worth considering, if only to reinforce the moral culpability of everyone involved in enabling torture in our name. And as long as we’re handing out imaginary pardons for that, we should save one for the media too.
Reed Richardson is a media critic whose work has appeared in The Nation, Harvard University’s Nieman Reports and the textbook Media Ethics (Current Controversies).

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