Why Torture Threatens America
Mike German
Huffington Post
Posted February 27, 2008
The Senate Intelligence Committee played host to a theater of the absurd in early February when leaders of our intelligence agencies sat down to provide their assessment of the threats still facing our country six and a half years into the Bush administration's so-called Global War on Terrorism. The Directors of National Intelligence, Central Intelligence, Defense Intelligence, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation tried mightily to have it both ways as they crowed about their success in making our nation safer while simultaneously claiming our security situation grows more dire every day. No doubt they had a tough mission. They had to claim remarkable success in order to justify their abject lawlessness in pursuit of global threats, both real and imagined, while at the same time leverage the fear of future threats to con Congress into giving them even more power to spy on the American people - with immunity for past transgressions thrown in for good measure.
Unfortunately the increasing level of threat was the easier case to make, as Committee Chairman Senator Jay Rockefeller opened the hearing with his own assessment that the risk to U.S. interests "has grown substantially" over the last year. This assessment begs a question: are the Bush administration's post-9/11 counterterrorism policies actually making our nation less secure? Of course DNI Michael McConnell's 45-page description [PDF] of the risks posed by today's emerging threats - ranging from homegrown terrorists to cyber-criminals to Pakistani nukes - more than proved the case. Despite more than six years with the "gloves off," despite the sacrifice Americans have paid in blood and treasure - not to mention the loss of our own civil liberties and privacy - we are no more secure from terrorism today than we were on September 10, 2001. What the Senate hearing makes clear is that the intelligence community that failed us so catastrophically on 9/11 still does not understand how terrorism works, and still does not have a comprehensive strategy to defeat al Qaeda and its offspring.
(Continued here.)
Huffington Post
Posted February 27, 2008
The Senate Intelligence Committee played host to a theater of the absurd in early February when leaders of our intelligence agencies sat down to provide their assessment of the threats still facing our country six and a half years into the Bush administration's so-called Global War on Terrorism. The Directors of National Intelligence, Central Intelligence, Defense Intelligence, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation tried mightily to have it both ways as they crowed about their success in making our nation safer while simultaneously claiming our security situation grows more dire every day. No doubt they had a tough mission. They had to claim remarkable success in order to justify their abject lawlessness in pursuit of global threats, both real and imagined, while at the same time leverage the fear of future threats to con Congress into giving them even more power to spy on the American people - with immunity for past transgressions thrown in for good measure.
Unfortunately the increasing level of threat was the easier case to make, as Committee Chairman Senator Jay Rockefeller opened the hearing with his own assessment that the risk to U.S. interests "has grown substantially" over the last year. This assessment begs a question: are the Bush administration's post-9/11 counterterrorism policies actually making our nation less secure? Of course DNI Michael McConnell's 45-page description [PDF] of the risks posed by today's emerging threats - ranging from homegrown terrorists to cyber-criminals to Pakistani nukes - more than proved the case. Despite more than six years with the "gloves off," despite the sacrifice Americans have paid in blood and treasure - not to mention the loss of our own civil liberties and privacy - we are no more secure from terrorism today than we were on September 10, 2001. What the Senate hearing makes clear is that the intelligence community that failed us so catastrophically on 9/11 still does not understand how terrorism works, and still does not have a comprehensive strategy to defeat al Qaeda and its offspring.
(Continued here.)
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