aRougeAgency Says What?

It's been a real treat watching this water boarding business unfold. Such spineless equivocating, such translucent straw men, such shameless diversion from the matter at hand....it really does make for good theater until you realize the actors are the elite cadre of a supposedly great nation.

This Pelosi business....did she know people were being water boarded? Well, let's think short and hard about whether that really matters. It would be like insisting upon prosecuting a casual viewer of a crime (as in the finale of Seinfeld) rather than the criminal. Of course Pelosi knew. She's obviously full of shit. But so is everyone else. If these people had enemas, you could fit them into a cigarette pack.

First of all, this obsession upon the specific tactic of water boarding obscures the fact that thousands of detainees have been abused, if not tortured, by American spies and soldiers. The Pentagon (not the op-ed board of the Daily Worker....the fucking Pentagon) has acknowledged upwards of 20 murders of detainees by Americans.

But what of water boarding? Well, we now know that this torture tactic was used not to prevent an imminent attack on the United States. Rather, the CIA was ordered to torture detainees in order to elicit "confessions" regarding Saddam Hussein's possession of WMD and ties to al Qaeda. Neither of those propositions were true, of course.

So, torture was not used to prevent violence upon Americans. It was used to justify violence perpetrated by Americans upon people who had never attacked them. How Henry the 8th of US.

We tortured people in order to get them to confess to things that weren't true, which is historically the most common motivation of torture.

500 years ago, the "Holy" Church would torture people until they "admitted" that they sun revolved around the Earth.

400 years ago, "civilized" countries would torture people until they "admitted" that they were possessed by the Devil.

70 years ago, Stalin would torture people until they "admitted" that they were American spies.

60 years ago, Chinese and North Koreans tortured American soldiers until they "admitted" that they were war criminals and that North Korea was a socialist paradise.

6 years ago, we tortured detainees until they "admitted" that they had been trained by Saddam Hussein in chemical weaponry.

So, there's that. All this ticking bomb business? Yes, the bomb was ticking. But the bomb was in Baghdad. And its fuse was lit in Washington.

And as for the CIA, let us examine their contention that they told Pelosi they were torturing (as is that would make it legal). The whole point of this clusterfuck is that we will NEVER know who was told what because of the very rules, or lack thereof, surrounding the CIA.

The CIA is the only government agency whose budget, employees, and operations are not public. In other words, it operates entirely beyond public purview, which violates every premise of a free country. Is it a necessary evil? Perhaps.

But still, consider the arrangement. When the CIA decides to do something (or, as is more common, is told to do something) it is required to inform a handful of senators. The catch is, no notes or any other form of recording are allowed at these briefings. It doesn't take much imagination to see how this creates opportunities for nefarious ploys of all sorts.

The CIA is, by definition, a rogue agency. The common trope is that the CIA's successes are secret but that its failures are public. Perhaps.

Since we can never know about these "private successes", let us consider some of their public failures. Out intelligence agency has failed to predict in my lifetime: the fall of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Kuwait, Saddam's very advanced WMD program in 1991, Pakistan's acquisition of nuclear weapons, the 9/11 attacks, the location of Osama bin Laden, Saddam's total lack of WMD in 2003. That's the short list.

So we know the public failures. And that's all we know. And we're supposed to be scandalized by the proposition that the CIA misled a member of Congress in a secret and unrecorded briefing?

Perhaps I'm being too hard on the CIA. Surely they do good work. Maybe they saved us from Martian invasion last month. Too bad they wouldn't be allowed to tell us if they did. Keep those successes private, boys.