Evil torturers catch a break: How America got distracted from a national travesty (Salon)

[inanna]

How the Sony story and Cuba reset eclipsed the torture report's horrors -- causing a dangerous lack of outrage

The United States is in real trouble when the story about the hacking into Sony Pictures computers and their decision to pull an inane comedy totally big foots the deeply troubling Senate Intelligence Committee’s study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.

Talk about using the holidays to flush bad news. Between the salacious internal Sony emails, the Obama administration’s watershed reset of U.S.-Cuban relations, and Christmas the average American will not get reporting on the fine print in the Senate Committee report nor a full analysis of the ambiguous CIA response.

In this case the devil really is in the details. For years the public was told the torture techniques saved lives, prevented additional terror attacks and helped lead to the capture of Osama bin Laden. Not so, says the Senate report, which goes on to chronicle years of obfuscation, deceit and deception by a CIA that was hell-bent on covering its tracks. Now the CIA is saying it is “unknowable” if the torture techniques produced results.

Even well into the Obama administration the Agency continued to go to the extraordinary steps of hacking into the Senate Committee’s computers. The Agency’s track record already includes the covert destruction in 2005 of 92 videos of detainee interrogations, which would have been critical to congressional investigators. In 2010 a federal special prosecutor declined to prosecute.

Link: http://www.salon.com/2014/12/24/evil_torturers_catch_a_break_how_america_got_distracted_from_a_national_travesty/