{UAH} DID OBAMA ONLY WIRE TAP TRUMP?

Washington buries the CIA torture report

 

One month ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee

released the 500-page summary of its voluminous

report on the torture of prisoners in secret CIA facilities

overseas, conducted between 2002 and 2007. In grisly

detail, the report documented such practices as

waterboarding, systematic beatings, and hitherto

unknown tortures like “rectal feeding.” But in practice,

the report has been buried, its evidence of government

criminality ignored, the perpetrators and organizers of

torture going scot-free.

As the World Socialist Web Site declared at the time,

“Two irrefutable conclusions flow from the release of

the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA

torture: 1) The United States, during the Bush

administration, committed criminal acts of the most

serious character, in violation of international and

domestic law; and 2) None of those responsible for

these crimes will be arrested, indicted or prosecuted for

their actions.”

Far from being shamed or humiliated by the detailed

exposure of their criminality, those most implicated in

the establishment and operation of the torture chambers

have brazenly defended their conduct. From former

Vice President Dick Cheney to ex-CIA directors

George Tenet, Michael Hayden and Porter Goss, to the

operational head of the interrogation program, Jose

Rodriguez, they have displayed a well-justified

confidence that the Obama administration will protect

them from any consequences.

The Obama administration has officially shut down

the secret CIA prisons and adopted a policy of blowing

up its enemies with drone-fired missiles rather than

capturing them. The shift from interrogation to

extermination has increased the number of innocent

victims many-fold. Whereas dozens of those jailed in

CIA prisons were found to have no connection to

terrorism, the drone-missile strikes have killed

thousands of civilians in Pakistan, Yemen and other

countries.

Two recent incidents demonstrate the complicity of

the Obama administration with the torturers. On

December 30, the outgoing chairman of the Senate

Intelligence Committee, Senator Dianne Feinstein, sent

a nine-page letter to the president outlining proposed

legislative and administrative actions to be taken on the

basis of the torture report.

The changes were largely cosmetic, such as enacting

into law the ban on waterboarding and other forms of

torture imposed by executive order after Obama took

office in 2009. Even these minimal legislative actions

will go nowhere in the new Republican-controlled

Congress, and the proposed administrative actions will

be ignored by the military-intelligence apparatus. The

White House has not bothered to respond to

Feinstein’s letter.

In a statement issued January 5, the CIA announced

that after four years in office, the agency’s

inspector-general David Buckley was resigning,

effective the end of the month, to “pursue an

opportunity in the private sector.” Buckley ran afoul of

the CIA top brass with a report last July acknowledging

that five CIA operatives had penetrated the computers

used by Senate Intelligence Committee staffers who

prepared the torture report, in an effort to find out how

the Senate panel had obtained certain CIA internal

documents that the agency had decided to withhold

from the committee that has legal oversight authority.

This electronic surveillance of the legislative branch

was so brazenly criminal that Senator Feinstein felt

compelled to deliver a one-hour address on the floor of

the Senate last March denouncing the agency’s actions.

She charged that the agency “may well have violated

the separation-of-powers principle embodied in the

United States Constitution,” and also “the Fourth

Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as

well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the

CIA from conducting domestic searches or

surveillance.”

 

EM

On the 49^th Parallel          

                 Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja and Dr. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda is in anarchy"
                    Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni, Ssabassajja na Dk. Kiiza Besigye, Uganda ni katika machafuko"