Accountability/Reform Farce

Before subjecting a detainee to interrogation, a 2002 cable notes, C.I.A. officers sought assurances that he would “remain in isolation and incommunicado for the remainder of his life.” Permanent, extrajudicial disappearance was apparently preferable to letting the prisoner ever tell what had been done to him. That logic may explain why no “high value detainee” subjected to the most extreme tactics and still in U.S. custody in Guantánamo has yet been given an open trial.

  New Yorker

And never will.

In June of 2003, the Vice-President’s counsel asked the C.I.A’.s general counsel if the agency was videotaping its waterboarding sessions. His answer was no. That was technically true, since it was not videotaping them at the time. But it had done so previously, and it had the tapes. The C.I.A. used the same evasion on Senate overseers. A day after a senator proposed a commission to look into detainee matters, the tapes were destroyed. Similar deceptions on many levels are so rife in the report that a reader can’t help but wonder if agency officials didn’t simply regard their cloak of state secrecy as a license to circumvent accountability.

And why shouldn’t they? There’s been no accountability for our foreign policy and war crimes since…well, since the United States of America were founded and produced a military.

It remains to be seen, though, whether the report will spur lasting reform.

Pipe me up another dream, son.

“Nothing predicts future behavior as much as past impunity.” [ -- Darius Rejali, professor of political science at Reed College and expert on torture regimes]

He'd have liked to have done it personally. In fact, I suppose, we don't know that he didn't.