Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report

Dear Friends,

Since it has not been in the news much lately, you may have forgotten the report done by the Senate Intelligence Committee about the Bush era torture.  The Senate Intelligence Committee voted long ago to release the report, but the Obama Administration is demanding so many redactions that the report loses its impact.  Needless to say, the report shows that the United States engaged in torture. Denis McDonough, the President's chief of staff, has been negotiating the issue with Senate Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee.  He is siding with the CIA in the fight over redactions.  You can read about the most recent negotiations here.  So this issue is not just what some lower level person is doing.  The Chief of Staff to the President of the United States is doing the negotiating.  You cannot get any closer to the President taking the action than having his chief of staff do it.

President Obama has not held any senior person responsible for torturing in our name, a clear violation of both United States and international law.  Why is it that he is so intent on prosecuting Edward Snowden for disclosing the illegal activity of the United States government and not the people who tortured and authorized torture?  Now President Obama is fighting to keep the American public and the world from knowing the full extent of the torture.

There is significant urgency in getting this report released in a form that gives the public a true view of what happened, since once the Republicans take control of the Senate, you can rest assured that there will be no push from the Senate to get the report released.  So I have heard a couple of times lately about how to get the report to the public.  I had forgotten that then Senator Mike Gravel from Alaska called a late night meeting of a subcommittee and read the Pentagon Papers into the record before the Supreme Court refused to block The New York Times from publishing them.  For those of you who were not around or old enough to remember the Pentagon Papers, they were a group of classified documents that demonstrated the our government had lied and covered up incidents in the Vietnam war.

The Constitution gives absolute first amendment free speech rights to sitting members of Congress for things they say on the floor, in committee meetings, etc.  The Supreme Court affirmed that right to protect Senator Gravel who knowingly read classified documents into the public record.  While a Senator or Representative is protected from prosecution outside Congress, he/she can be censured, expelled from Congress, etc.  Of course there is also a lot of peer pressure not to take such an action.

For those of us that want full disclosure of the torturing that our government did, we are hoping that Senator Mark Udall will follow in Senator Mike Gravel's footsteps and read the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture into the public record.  Senator Udall has been a very vocal proponent of full disclosure of the report and was defeated for reelection a couple of weeks ago.  Hence he has the freedom to follow through on his strongly held belief that the report should be disclosed to the public by finding a way to read it into the record.

There is a great article on The Intercept by Dan Froomkin (here) that lays out what Senator Gravel did and what Senator Udall should do.  The article also indicates support for this approach from legal experts including the following quote:

Josh Chafetz, a Cornell Law School [sic], wrote in the Harvard Law Review recently:

[G]iven the extent to which executive branch secrecy determinations are made to advance executive branch interests, there is no reason for Congress to offer automatic deference to those determinations.

And in the current circumstances, he wrote:

[I]f Senators Wyden and Udall have not attempted to invoke the disclosure procedures, then an explanation should be demanded of them. They obviously believe that disturbing information is being withheld, and they obviously are frustrated — a frustration that appears to be shared by members of both parties and both houses — by what they see as a pattern of lies from the executive branch. Where is the Gravelian spirit?

Please join me in telling President Obama (here) to stop blocking meaningful disclosure of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture and also in encouraging Senator Udall (here) to do what Senator Gravel did.

Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal