This has not been a good year for black males and law enforcement officers but it is also a year that has dramatized the troubled nature of national security in America. The release of the Senate Intelligence Report on torture provides us with frightening insight into the Enhancement Interrogation Techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency immediately after 9/11/2001. Bob Mc Culloch’s release of the Grand Jury transcripts also provides startling revelations vis-à-vis the corruption in the criminal justice system.
The Senate Intelligence Report is comprised of a summary of 500 pages extrapolated from 6,000 documents. The Grand Jury St. Louis transcript encompasses thousands of pages. Most Americans will not rummage through those documents in any meaningful way and once the news spotlight will fade and move on to a new crisis. The criminal transgressions will disappear like toxic waste taken out to sea by tidal waves. There is an endemic flaw in American culture that anything that reflects badly on American civilization, we deny it and/or find ways to rationalize why those dastardly actions had to be taken. There is no temerity to engage in “truth”. There is no reckoning. We are quite adept at lying to ourselves.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney represents what the late Senator William Fulbright would call the Ugly American. Dick Cheney led the fight in the United States Congress to label Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress as terrorists. The same Dick Cheney using warped intelligence convinced the American people that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States and was armed with weapons of mass destruction. He also shared with the American people that the U.S. military would be greeted as liberators in Iraq.
The United States invaded Iraq and discovered that Saddam’s capacity for weapons of mass destruction was effectively dismantled by United Nations inspectors soon after the Gulf War. But Cheney, the penultimate bull dog, never apologized to the American people that he had grossly miscalculated. He was too busy putting together the Enhanced Interrogation Techniques which are indistinguishable from torture. The Senate Intelligence Report empirically makes the case that the Enhancement Interrogation Techniques or torture methods did not produce actionable intelligence yet the mastermind of the torture techniques, Dick Cheney, dismisses a report that he has not read and refers to it as “crap”.
The Central Intelligence Agency is a government within a government. Other law enforcement agencies like the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Border Patrol behave in a similar manner. The heads of those agencies feel it is their responsibility to defend and rationalize for any lawlessness that is exposed under their watch. John Brennan, who is the current head of the C.I.A., in a response to the Senate Intelligence Report, succumbs to agency double talk. He defends the torture techniques, argues that they were necessary to keep the country safe yet agrees that the Program should have been abandoned. Brennan sides with President Obama that techniques of torture should not be used by the C.I.A.
The Cheneys and the Brennans ensure that the institutionalized culture of law enforcement and security agencies being above the law and operatives being untouchable will not be challenged by those who should lead and uphold the values of our democratic society.
The Bush administration under Cheney’s stewardship had the Justice Department write legal briefs justifying the use of torture like waterboarding even though the Geneva Conventions and the Treaty and Torture ratified by the U.S. Senate under President Reagan outlawed the use of torture. Cheney’s rationalization is that the legal briefs from the Justice Department provided the legal cover for the torture and according to Cheney, the terrorists were unlawful combatants not covered by the Geneva Conventions.
America conducted War Tribunals after World War 11 and convicted Germans of criminality. It is strange that America that is quite critical of human rights abuses is not even a member of the International Court of Justice, an international court established by the United Nations to prosecute civilian and military leaders who engage in war crimes. In many respects what Senator Diane Feinstein (D/California) has done is unveil a dark secret of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration. An indispensable value of democracy is that the ends cannot justify the means. That is the logic of terrorists. That is how the Islamic State justifies its atrocities.
The evidence is mounting that law enforcement on the state level and on the national level has become a power accountable to itself. Internal controls appear to be non-existent and leaders presume that to administer such agencies, one has to leave the no-fault culture untouched. Leaders like Brennan simply follow the agency line. There is no reckoning. No one is responsible for war crimes from the Vice President to the actual operatives.
The Senate Intelligence Report was not a bi-partisan effort. The Senate Republicans with the exception of Senator John McCain were not interested in the findings and opposed the release of the Report. Conservatives are comfortable sweeping the dirt under the rug. In a world of technological transparency, the Dick Cheney denial and heartlessness detracts from America’s moral capacity to lead the free world.
