In the days following the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, the CIA's defenders appeared on numerous media outlets and current CIA director John Brennan gave a widely covered speech defending the agency. Less well covered, however, have been rebuttals of virtually all of the claims made in the various defenders' media appearances.
The unequal media coverage allotted to anti-war perspectives in the run-up to and early days of the Iraq War was well documented. The title of Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting's 2003 article on Iraq War coverage, "Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent" describes the deference shown to administration officials. Again, the media seems to be showing undue deference to current and former senior government officials.
The Senate Intelligence Committee spent five years compiling a 6,700 page report, though only the executive summary was declassified and released. While the study was criticized by many CIA defenders for not directly interviewing CIA personnel:
From early 2009 to late 2012, a small group of Committee staff reviewed the more than six million pages of CIA materials, to include operational cables, intelligence reports, internal memoranda and emails, briefing materials, interview transcripts, contracts, and other records. The breadth of documentary material on which the Study relied and which the Committee Study cites is unprecedented.
...
While the Committee did not interview CIA officials in the context of the Committee Study, it had access to and drew from the interviews of numerous CIA officials conducted by the CIA's Inspector General and the CIA Oral History program on subjects that lie at the heart of the Committee Study, as well as past testimony to the Committee.
(Forward to Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program)
While many of the agency's defenders asserted that one or more of the study's conclusions were false in their media appearances, none provided any factual evidence that, on balance, refutes any of the study's key conclusions.
Even more alarming, Senate Intelligence Committee member Mark Udall outlined key findings of the classified internal CIA "Panetta Review" which contradict representations previously made by current CIA director John Brennan to the Senate committee:
The report has been extensively criticized for being a "partisan" report. However, as Senate Intelligence Committee member Ron Wyden subsequently responded on Meet the Press, "Fact's aren't partisan." He and Mark Udall, both Senate Democrats, have been strongly critical of the Obama administration and its CIA director John Brennan. Udall directly called for Brennan's resignation while Wyden called for an end to the current "culture of denial" at the CIA. Meanwhile, Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein took the unprecedented step of fact-checking Brennan's speech in real time on Twitter. Furthermore, the most powerful floor speech in support of the report's release came from Senate Republican John McCain:
Having introduced the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, McCain has been one of the Senate's most vocal opponents of torture, and was joined by fellow Republican Lindsey Graham in support of the release of the current report.
Former CIA Director Michael Hayden's extensive misrepresentations to the Senate Committee were documented in in the report, itself. However, the widely circulated Wall Street Journal op-ed that he co-authored with other former directors and deputy directors of the CIA was printed without any fact-checking. Senate Intelligence Committe member Ron Wyden's extensive fact-check of the WSJ op-ed piece received little coverage.
One of the most galling media interviews was Jose Rodriguez' appearance on Fox News Sunday, in which he argued that Nancy Pelosi "knew every one of our enhanced interrogations" and that Democrats were "throwing the CIA under the bus." He was the same person who ordered videotapes of interrogations destroyed back in 2005, following a request from Jay Rockefeller, a Democratic member of the same Senate committee resposible for publishing the current report. This destruction of evidence was in direct violation of "standing orders from the [Bush] White House not to destroy the tapes."
The award for most unsettling media appearance, however, has to be torture enthusiast Dick Cheney's appearance on Meet The Press, in which he said that he "was not concerned about the capture or interrogation of foreign nationals who were ultimately revealed to be innocent" and that he "would do it again in a minute." However, in the absence of the context provided by the report, itself, it is impossible for viewers to understand how horrific "it" really is:
1) Torture of "wrongfully detained" individuals.
2) The death of a Gul Rahman in custody.
He "was dragged though the dirt and grime of the corridors, his mouth taped, his clothes falling off. His captors slammed and punched him, and left him chained to a concrete floor in a sweatshirt but no pants. Officials labeled the death hypothermia, though his face, legs, shoulders and waist were cut and bruised.
A few months later in March 2003, with the outside world still unaware of the secret facility, a lead CIA officer who ordered Rahman to be shackled naked in his cell was presented a $2,500 "cash award" for his "consistently superior work," the report states.
3) The torture of two individuals who were CIA contacts trying to provide the CIA with intelligence.
4) "Rectal feeding" (rape of detainees). Contrary to assertions by Dick Cheney and Michael Hayden, "rectal feeding" is not a "medical procedure." As a Harvard Medical School professor, employed as an emergency medicine physician by Massachusetts General Hospital, indicated:
“No one in the United States is hydrating anybody through their rectum. Nobody is feeding anybody through their rectum. … That’s not a normal practice.”
The media has been providing a platform for those guilty of war crimes to frame their conduct as part of a debate on the trade-off between human rights and security. However, the Senate report makes it clear and unambiguous that the horrific acts of a few miscreants at the CIA did not advance our security or national interest in the course of their conduct.
Instead of allowing a small number of former officials to frame those who would hold them to account as "throwing the CIA under the bus," the media should be giving more attention to the true heroes in government who helped keep Americans safe while seeking to live up to our values.