Fallout of torture by CIA unlikely to bring charges

W hen somebody says it is time to move on, it means there is something deeply embarrassing they don’t want to discuss in public. U.S. President Barack Obama said that about the Senate intelligence committee’s report, published Tuesday, about the Central Intelligence Agency’s use of torture in the years after 9/11.

He put the best face on it after Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s committee released the 528-page report, talking about how “part of what sets us (Americans) apart is that when we do something wrong, we acknowledge it.” But as recently as Friday, Secretary of State John Kerry urged Feinstein not to release the report now on the grounds that the “timing” was wrong.

Feinstein ignored him because she knew (as did he) that if the report was not put out now, it never would be. Next month a new Congress will take office, and the majority on the new Senate intelligence committee will be Republicans who would certainly make sure that it never sees the light of day.

But there is one Republican senator at least who thinks differently. John McCain said bluntly that torture “rarely yields credible information . . . What might come as a surprise, not just to our enemies, but to many Americans, is how little these practices did to aid our efforts to bring 9/11 culprits to justice and to find and prevent terrorist attacks today and tomorrow.”

McCain was tortured while a prisoner-of-war in North Vietnam in 1968, and eventually made an anti-American propaganda “confession.” As he later said, “I had learned what we all learned over there: Every man has his breaking point. I had reached mine.”

Even McCain, however, confined himself to saying torture was not a useful instrument. He avoided talking about the more important fact it is also a grave crime under international law, because that would mean admitting senior officials in former president George W. Bush’s Republican administrations who authorized torture in 2002-06 — possibly including Bush himself — should face prosecution.

The debate in the U.S. will be between those who insist waterboarding, regular beatings, “stress positions,” ice baths, sleep deprivation, “rectal feeding” and other torture techniques yielded useful information and saved American lives, and those who say it was all useless.

The Senate committee’s report examines 20 cases of counterterrorism “successes” achieved by torture that the CIA has used to justify its actions and concludes not one produced unique or otherwise unavailable intelligence.

The American Civil Liberties Union, to its credit, says the attorney general should appoint a special prosecutor to conduct “an independent and complete investigation of Bush administration officials who created, approved, carried out and covered up the torture program … In our system, no one should be above the law, yet only a handful of mainly low-level personnel have been criminally prosecuted for abuse. That is a scandal.”

But discussion about punishing people will mostly be conducted outside the U.S., and not by governments. Several dozen American allies that were accomplices with the CIA have all exercised their right to have information about collaboration removed from the report.

The debate will have to take place in the media and in the international organizations. United Nations special rapporteur on human rights Ben Emmerson said in Geneva senior officials from the Bush administration who planned and sanctioned these crimes must be prosecuted, as well as CIA and U.S. government officials responsible for torture such as waterboarding. So far, only one former CIA official, John Kyriakou, has been jailed in connection with the torture program, and he was prosecuted for confirming the CIA was waterboarding prisoners.