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Mayer writes: "At the end of a week in which we were faced anew with the awful facts of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program, it’s hard not to conclude that President Obama missed an important opportunity to set the record straight."

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who blew the whistle on CIA practices. (photo: Zinta Lundborg/Bloomberg)
Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who blew the whistle on CIA practices. (photo: Zinta Lundborg/Bloomberg)


ALSO SEE: The Charmed Life of a CIA Torturer

The Real Torture Patriots

By Jane Mayer, The New Yorker

15 December 14

 

t the end of a week in which we were faced anew with the awful facts of the C.I.A.’s interrogation and detention program, it’s hard not to conclude that President Obama missed an important opportunity to set the record straight.

As the revelations from the Senate Intelligence Committee poured forth, depicting even worse brutality than what was previously understood to have happened and a program that could only be described as sadistic, President Obama praised C.I.A. officers as “patriots” and allowed John Brennan, his C.I.A. director, to stop short of calling the tactics “torture.”

The White House spokesman Josh Earnest, meanwhile, shilly-shallied through one embarrassing press briefing after another, doing all he could to duck rather than answer the question of whether the inhumane interrogation tactics that Obama outlawed during his first week in office had proven useful during the Bush years. The message wasn’t just elliptical; the President and his top spokesmen were talking in circles.

It appeared that Obama and Brennan had a single purpose, which was to not “lose Langley,” as people in Washington say, meaning that they didn’t want to alienate those still working at the C.I.A. This calculation—that C.I.A. officers, unlike soldiers, law-enforcement officers, and other public servants who risk their lives to serve the country, are too fragile for criticism, too valuable to fire, and too patriotic to prosecute—somehow tied the Obama Administration in knots.

It didn’t have to be this way. There have been a number of true “torture patriots,” many of them at the C.I.A., who Obama and Brennan could have praised while sending a very clear message to the Agency and to the public. They are the officers who blew the whistle on the program internally and externally, some of whom have paid a very high price for their actions. The Senate report itself describes C.I.A. officers in tears at early interrogations, asking for transfers and, in some instances, expressing doubts and pushing back. By 2004, the internal criticism had grown loud enough that John Helgerson, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, conducted a serious and influential internal investigation. This, in turn, led the Justice Department to ask the C.I.A. to suspend the torture program until it could be reconciled with the law. Unfortunately, it was renewed for two more years, until the Supreme Court brought it to a halt.

Outside the C.I.A., many others risked their jobs and legal peril in efforts to blow the whistle on a program they found ethically, morally, and legally heinous. These were not only liberal lawyers and human-rights activists—although many of them acted nobly and selflessly—but also soldiers and F.B.I. agents, like Ali Soufan, and even some Bush Administration political appointees, like Alberto Mora, the former general counsel of the U.S. Navy, who risked everything to shine light on the abuses, in the hope of bringing America back from what Vice-President Dick Cheney called “the dark side.”

As David Luban, a professor of law at Georgetown University and the author of “Torture, Power, and Law,” suggested in the Times, there are many forms of accountability for torture, and one of the most meaningful would be to honor the real torture patriots—those who tried to stop it. What a better week it would have been if Obama had.


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