December 7, 2014, 2:57 PM Dire warning over pending released of CIA torture report In this file photo, Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Michigan, questions then-Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius during a committee hearing on October 30, 2013 in Washington, DC. Chip Somodevilla, Getty Images - 417 Comments <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/mike-rogers-releasing-senates-cia-torture-report-a-terrible-idea/#postComments> - 437 Shares - 266 Tweets - Stumble - Email <?subject=Your%20friend%20has%20shared%20a%20CBSNews%20link%20with%20you&body=Dire%20warning%20over%20pending%20released%20of%20CIA%20torture%20report%0Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.cbsnews.com%2Fnews%2Fmike-rogers-releasing-senates-cia-torture-report-a-terrible-idea> - More +
*WASHINGTON -- *Foreign governments and U.S. intelligence agencies are predicting that the release of a Senate report examining the use of torture by the CIA <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/senate-still-at-odds-with-cia-white-house-over-torture-report/> will cause "violence and deaths" abroad, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee said Sunday. Rep. Mike Rogers, a Michigan Republican, is regularly briefed on intelligence assessments. He told CNN's "State of the Union" that U.S. intelligence agencies and foreign governments have said privately that the release of the report on CIA interrogations a decade ago will be used by extremists to incite violence that is likely to cost lives. The 480-page report, a summary of a still-classified 6,000 page study, is expected to be made public next week. "I think this is a terrible idea," Rogers said of the expected release. "Our foreign partners are telling us this will cause violence and deaths...Foreign leaders have approached the government and said, 'You do this, this will cause violence and deaths.' Our own intelligence community has assessed that this will cause violence and deaths." A U.S. intelligence official, who was not authorized to be quoted discussing classified intelligence assessments, said Congress had been warned "of the heightened potential that the release could stimulate a violent response." Play Video Assessing the impact of the Senate's CIA torture report <http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/assessing-the-impact-of-the-senates-cia-torture-report> That concern was seconded Sunday by former CIA Director Michael Hayden <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/former-cia-chief-michael-hayden-raises-alarm-about-forthcoming-senate-torture-report/>, who told CBS News' "Face the Nation" that the report could "be used by our enemies to motivate people to attack Americans in American facilities overseas." "I am genuinely concerned by that, as was the secretary of state and the director of national intelligence," he said. He also warned that the report's release could undermine cooperation between the U.S. and other countries on intelligence and counterterrorism. "There are countries out there who have cooperated with us in the war on terror at some political risk who were relying on American discretion," he explained. "I can't imagine anyone out there going forward in the future who would be willing to do anything with us that even smacks of political danger." On Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry urged the senator in charge of the report <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kerry-asks-feinstein-to-delay-release-of-cia-torture-report/> to consider the timing of the release, though Obama administration officials say they still support making it public. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, has not responded to reports of the Kerry call, though she told the Los Angeles Times in a story published Sunday that "We have to get this report out." A congressional aide noted that the White House has led negotiations to declassify the report since April, and that both the president and his director of national intelligence have endorsed its release. The government has taken steps to beef up security at American posts around the world, said the aide, who was not authorized to be quoted by name and spoke on condition of anonymity. Play Video Obama on Senate's CIA report: "We tortured some folks" <http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/obama-on-senates-cia-report-we-tortured-some-folks> The report amounts to the first public accounting of the CIA's use of torture on al Qaeda detainees held in secret facilities <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gitmo-prisoners-cia-extraordinary-rendition-eu-court/> in Europe and Asia in the years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. U.S. officials who have read the report say it includes disturbing new details about the CIA's use of such techniques as sleep deprivation, confinement in small spaces, humiliation and the simulated drowning process known as waterboarding. President Barack Obama has acknowledged, "We tortured some folks <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-we-tortured-some-folks-after-911/>." The report also says the torture failed to produce life-saving intelligence, a conclusion disputed by current and former intelligence officials, including CIA director John Brennan. Rogers questioned why the report needed to become public, given that the Justice Department investigated and filed no criminal charges. "What good will come of this report?" he asked. "There's been a Department of Justice investigation. It was stopped under the Bush administration. There has been congressional action to stop this activity. President Obama put an executive order saying he wouldn't continue any of that activity." Feinstein told the Los Angeles Times <http://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-feinstein-intel-20141207-story.html#page=2> that the harsh interrogations undermined "societal and constitutional values that we are very proud of. Anybody who reads this is going to never let this happen again." CBS/AP --- The United Nations Committee Against Torture issued a lengthy report today assessing the performance of the 156 countries whose governments have ratified the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, which took effect two decades ago. The report subjected a major country to a wide-ranging critique, indicting it for a long list of human rights violations including: Refusal to prosecute officials who engage in or sanction torture of prisoners. Detaining prisoners indefinitely without trial or other judicial proceeding, or any hope of release. Kidnapping individuals overseas and torturing them in secret prisons. Approving a manual for interrogation of prisoners that includes methods classified as torture under the Geneva Conventions. Imprisoning immigrants under degrading conditions and refusing to acknowledge their claims as refugees fleeing persecution. Imposing the death penalty on hundreds of prisoners, many of them from oppressed racial and ethnic minorities, many of them demonstrably innocent or unfairly tried. Widespread use of solitary confinement, considered a form of torture, at all levels of the prison system. Severe abuse of juveniles, pregnant women and other vulnerable groups both in police custody and in prisons. Maintaining a regime of police violence, particularly against young men from racial and ethnic minorities, and refusing to restrain or punish police who kill, wound or torture. It will not come as any surprise to readers of the WSWS that the country named is not China, or Russia, or Iran, or some other target of the American ruling class, but the US itself. The government that claims the right to bully, blockade, and attack any country in the world in the name of “human rights” and “democracy” is guilty of the most heinous crimes. The language of the report is both cautious and bureaucratic, and there are strained efforts to congratulate the Obama administration on alleged improvements, compared to the Bush administration, on such practices as extraordinary rendition and waterboarding. But the overall impact of this indictment is damning. There are some significant revelations. The committee notes that the US government had filed reservations to the Convention on Torture at the time of ratification, indicating that some practices condemned by the treaty would continue, and that the Obama administration has refused to alter this “restrictive interpretation” of the anti-torture treaty or introduce a prohibition of torture into federal law. The Obama administration has revoked Bush administration legal opinions declaring that waterboarding and other forms of torture were permissible, but it has not done the same to Bush-era claims that the US is obliged to observe international norms only at facilities within US borders, not at detention facilities on the soil of other countries. In other words, the legal basis for torture at secret CIA and military prisons still remains fully in effect. The report also notes that the US government is in violation of its commitment under the Convention on Torture to “Ensure that alleged perpetrators and accomplices are duly prosecuted, including persons in positions of command and those who provided legal cover to torture, and, if found guilty, handed down penalties commensurate with the grave nature of their acts.” Obama directly repudiated this legal obligation, in his directive to “look forward, not backward” on allegations of torture. While this remains a closed book to the American political establishment, the report underscores the seamless connection between military violence overseas and militarized police violence at home—though its criticisms are couched largely in racial terms. It condemns “racial profiling by police and immigration offices and growing militarisation of policing activities.” A spokesman said the committee members “voiced deep concern at the frequent and recurring police shootings in fatal pursuit of unarmed black individuals.” The document is the product of a three-week session in Geneva that included testimony from the parents of Michael Brown, the unarmed 18-year-old African-American who was shot to death by Ferguson, Missouri police officer Darren Wilson on August 9. The report was made public four days after a St. Louis County grand jury whitewashed the killing and dismissed all charges against the killer cop. The timing of the report is also significant, coming at the culmination of the protracted effort by the White House and CIA to suppress a major US Senate report on torture at CIA secret prisons between 2002 and 2006. The 6,000-page report was completed two years ago, but release of even a censored version of its 500-page executive summary has been blocked by CIA demands that so much of the document be redacted that it is almost incomprehensible. Two days before the report was made public, seven UN human rights experts issued an open letter to Obama that, while couched in friendly, even obsequious language, called for “the fullest possible release” of the CIA torture report and warned that Obama’s decision on the document would have “far-reaching consequences for victims of human rights violations everywhere and for the credibility of the United States.” The White House, however, has worked closely with the CIA in suppressing the document. Or more exactly, the CIA made its demands, and the White House has followed suit obediently. After initially agreeing with Senate investigators to use pseudonyms to mask the names of CIA operatives, including the torturers, the agency is now demanding that even the pseudonyms should be blacked out of the document. Foreign Policymagazine reported last week that the White House was “fiercely resisting the release of an executive summary of a 6,300-page Senate report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.” One Senate aide told the magazine, “Ideally, we should be closing ground and finalizing the last stages right now so that we can release the report post-Thanksgiving. But, despite the fact that the committee has drastically reduced the number of pseudonyms in the report, the White House is still resisting and dragging this out.” An additional factor is the impending takeover of the Senate by the Republican Party in January. Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, who would become chairman of the Intelligence Committee once the Republicans take control, is on record as opposing any public release of any information on CIA activities, regardless of their criminal nature. If the wrangling over release of the report is prolonged another month, the new Republican majority may well vote to withdraw the report entirely, saving the Democrats from having to do the job themselves. The Senate report is hardly a real indictment of the CIA. Lawyers for the Guantanamo Bay prisoners who were waterboarded dozens of times say that Senate investigators never took testimony from them. In other words, the only account of the torture comes those who participated in the torture, or sanctioned it, not from those who were its victims. It also reportedly does not level any accusations against the top executive, military and intelligence officials who drew up and sanctioned the criminal policy. That even such a document, with thousands of lines blacked out and vital information withheld, cannot be made public, speaks volumes about the decay and collapse of American democracy. The US ruling elite is incapable of coming clean about the period when, as Obama admitted, “We tortured some folks.” That is because the entire state apparatus is preparing for the use of similar methods against a much-feared upheaval among workers and young people at home. -- -- Thanks for being part of "PoliticalForum" at Google Groups. For options & help see http://groups.google.com/group/PoliticalForum * Visit our other community at http://www.PoliticalForum.com/ * It's active and moderated. Register and vote in our polls. * Read the latest breaking news, and more. --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "PoliticalForum" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. 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