Ridiculous: John Kerry Asks Dianne Feinstein Not To Release CIA Torture Report After Agreement Was Reached To Release On Monday

Failures

from the paging-mark-udall dept

Okay, this is just getting ridiculous. We’ve written plenty about the Senate Intelligence Committee’s massive $40 million, 6,000 page torture report, detailing a variety of failures related to the CIA’s torture program after 9/11. While the Committee voted (overwhelmingly) to release a redacted 480 page executive summary of the document, and the White House insisted it wanted to do so as well, since then it’s become clear that the White House was going to do everything to block it from actually getting out.

Yesterday it came out that an agreement had finally been reached on the redactions and that it would finally be released on Monday. Apparently, the CIA/White House won the battle over the question of redacting pseudonyms — which was a key fight. Basically, those who have seen the report say that if you redact the pseudonyms, important parts of what happened are greatly distorted (such as who is doing what). But apparently, that’s what was agreed to anyway.

However, after everyone started gearing up for the release on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry apparently called Senator Dianne Feinstein to argue that she should “delay” the release of the report, claiming that the timing is “sensitive” and that the US is worried it may mess up a variety of things:

?What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world — including parts of the world particularly implicated — and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,? an administration official told me. “He had a responsibility to do so because this isn?t just an intel issue — it?s a foreign policy issue.”

To put it simply, this is a complete bullshit argument. There’s always going to be “a lot going on in the world” especially in areas who are going to be upset by the report. There’s never going to be a “good” time to release a report that details just how screwed up the CIA’s torture program is — but it’s the only way to actually start the process of making things right and making sure that we, as a country don’t do that kind of thing again.

In fact, if the government is so damn concerned about the reaction to the release of the report, here’s an idea: don’t let the government do stuff that leads to a report that will create such a reaction!

Furthermore, the argument that a “delay” is necessary makes no sense either. Beyond the fact that there’s always something going on in the world, in this case, they’ve known that this report was coming for months. To argue they haven’t had enough time to prepare is clearly bogus. Back in April the State Department was whining about this as well, but now it’s had months to prepare and it’s still whining?

Finally, the claims by the State Department that it’s just asking for a delay, rather than to shelve the whole report ring hollow. One of the reasons that it’s coming out next week is because, after that, the Republicans are back in control, and they’ve indicated that they’ll bury the report entirely. At this point, if Feinstein gives in to Kerry, it seems like the only viable option for getting the report out to the world is to have outgoing Senator Mark Udall release it himself on the floor of the Senate.

Filed Under: cia, cia torture, dianne feinstein, john kerry, mark udall, state department, torture report