What You Should Know about CIA Torture

Can you handle the truth?

Then here it is, in simple language:

The CIA engaged in pointless sadistic practices against people many of whom had nothing to reveal anyway, and they lied to Congress, the White House, and the press to keep on torturing people.

7 Key Points From the C.I.A. Torture Report (in the flat language of the New York Times)

1. The C.I.A.’s interrogation techniques were more brutal and employed more extensively than the agency portrayed. 
2. The C.I.A. interrogation program was mismanaged and was not subject to adequate oversight.
3. The C.I.A. misled members of Congress and the White House about the effectiveness and extent of its brutal interrogation techniques.
4. Interrogators in the field who tried to stop the brutal techniques were repeatedly overruled by senior C.I.A. officials.
5. The C.I.A. repeatedly under-reported the number of people it detained and subjected to harsh interrogation techniques under the program.
6. At least 26 detainees were wrongfully held and did not meet the government’s standard for detention. 
7. The C.I.A. leaked classified information to journalists, exaggerating the success of interrogation methods in an effort to gain public support.

State of War, by James Risen: a review

Things you'll learn, or be reminded of and still shocked by, if you read State of War by James Risen:

1. CIA Director George Tenet got and kept his job by sucking up to power.
2. The CIA specifically avoided asking President George W. Bush for authorization to use torture, providing him with what the spy trade calls "plausible deniability."
3. The NSA started large-scale spying on Americans almost immediately after 9/11/2001, "The Bush administration...swept aside nearly thirty years of rules and regulations" to make this happen.
4. George W. sent clear signals that he wanted a pretext to go to war with Iraq. People who helped him get one were rewarded. People who warned that the intelligence was being skewed were punished. There was nothing like an objective assessment of the facts before we went to war.
5. The U.S. had every reason to know there was no active nuclear program in Iraq.
6. To claim there was a bioweapons program in Iraq, the U.S. relied on sources that the Europeans clearly told us were wrong. 
7. No one had a plan for what to do in Iraq after the war except for installing a president from the outside, a man (Ahmed Chalabi) that no one inside Iraq trusted. When that proved unworkable, they had to make it up as they went along--all the while pretending they were winning.
8. By going to war in Iraq, the Bush administration took its eye of Afghanistan, which became the biggest exporter of opium in the world...sending a lot of the poppy right here to the U.S.
9. The U.S. turned a blind eye to the ways that Saudi Arabia played both sides in the "war on terror."
10. The U.S. may have helped Iran advance its program for obtaining nuclear weapons. 

Risen focuses on the first term of George W. Bush, but he's scrupulous about pointing out when a problem actually began in the Clinton administration. He puts too much emphasis on individuals (Bush vs. Saddam Hussein, Tenet vs. Rumsfeld) and not enough on mistaken assumptions of U.S. foreign policy.

Still, this is a powerful book. I wish I, and everyone else, had read it when it came out!

The Woman Who Could Have Stopped the War in Iraq

The Iraq War could have been prevented if the CIA had listened to... Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad, a Cleveland anesthesiologist.

The CIA recruited Alhaddad to ask her brother Saad Tawfiq, an Iraqi electrical engineer, to reveal secrets about the Iraqi nuclear program. She asked.  He answered: there was no Iraqi nuclear program. It had been dead since 1991.

Alhaddad told the CIA what her brother had said.  They concluded he was lying. The Unites States government, from President Bush on down, was committed to going to war with Iraq--and they needed a nuclear weapons program as an excuse.

James Risen revealed this story in his 2006 book State of War.  Until I read the book, I had never heard of it. Had you?

Don't you think in a democracy we ought to have known that the U.S. went to war because our government couldn't handle the truth?

I Wonder How You Will React

re·ac·tive

• showing a response to a stimulus. "pupils are reactive to light" 
• acting in response to a situation rather than creating or controlling it.
  "a proactive rather than a reactive approach"  
• having a tendency to react chemically."nitrogen dioxide is a highly reactive gas"

I hardly ever hear the word "reactive" any more.  People are using the word "reactionary" instead.  Yet they have different meanings, and we need to keep both.

A reactionary is a person who holds political viewpoints that favor a return to a previous state in a society.  If you live in the U,S. and you want to go back to a time when "women knew their place," you're a reactionary.  (Not a conservative: that would mean wanting to keep things from changing,  Going backwards is a change.)

Being reactive, on the other hand, is not political.  It's a character trait.  If you say things like "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" and "Don't borrow trouble," you're probably a reactive person. 

"Reactive" can also describe the way one responds to a changing situation.  Right now, the U.S. is responding to the crisis in Iraq in a reactive way.  In 2003, the U.S. took the initiative.  This should tell you that waiting to see is not always the worst policy, and intervention not always the best.


Using "reactionary" when you mean "reactive" confuses the issue.  Very progressive people can have knee-jerk responses to things.  Right-wingers can plan for years in advance.  We need to keep the words that let us say so.