Fat Chance

America’s rising civil liberties movement lost one of its strongest advocates in the US Congress on Tuesday night, as Colorado’s Mark Udall lost his Senate seat to Republican Cory Gardner.

[...]

But Udall’s loss doesn’t have to be all bad. The lame-duck transparency advocate now has a rare opportunity to truly show his principles in the final two months of his Senate career and finally expose, in great detail, the secret government wrongdoing he’s been criticizing for years. On his way out the door, Udall can use congressional immunity provided to him by the Constitution’s Speech and Debate clause to read the Senate’s still-classified 6,000-page CIA torture report into the Congressional record – on the floor, on TV, for the world to see.

  The Guardian

He’s not going to do that. He’s going to go through the revolving door to some private corp position. If he had any real principles, he could have already done that and let the chips fall where they may. He’s no Edward Snowden.

In 1971, former Senator Mike Gravel famously read the top-secret classified Pentagon Papers for three hours before almost collapsing and then entering thousands of pages more into the record after he couldn’t speak for any longer from exhaustion.

Kudos to Gravel. Udall is not Gravel.

With secrecy-fetishist Republican Richard Burr likely taking over the chair of the intelligence committee, the public cover-up is probably only going to get worse next year. While the Huffington Post’s Ali Watkins writes that it’s likely Senator Dianne Feinstein wouldn’t let the Republicans take over without first releasing at least the executive summary of the report, she’d have to release a version full of incomprehensible redactions the CIA still won’t budge on. Which is to say nothing of the actual report, which will almost certainly never see the light of day unless someone like Udall – or some very brave whistleblower – takes bold action.

Don’t hold your breath.

 ...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.