The Justice Department
announced today that there will be no criminal prosecutions of CIA officers who destroyed interrogation tapes.
After a closely watched investigation of nearly three years, the decision by a special federal prosecutor is the latest example of Justice Department officials’ declining to seek criminal penalties for some of the controversial episodes in the C.I.A.’s now defunct detention and interrogation program.
Those tapes should have never been made in the first place, and those who destroyed them rightly recognized that they'd be a bonanza for anti-American propaganda should they become public.
Mr. Rodriguez [the key CIA officer involved] had argued that “the heat” agency officials would take over destroying the tapes “is nothing compared to what it would be if the tapes ever got into the public domain.”
Mr. Rodriguez told another top C.I.A. official that if the images were disclosed “out of context, they would make us look terrible; it would be ‘devastating’ to us,” an e-mail said. The tapes showed hours of interrogation of the two detainees, including the infliction of a technique called waterboarding that simulates drowning.
Details of CIA interrogation tactics should have remained secret. It's bad enough that so many details were released to the public as it is. But actual video would be even worse. Rodriguez and his associates should be commended for their actions, not investigated for prosecution. As his attorney says,
Rodriguez is “a hero and a patriot, who simply wanted to protect his people and his country,”
As I've pointed out many times before, intelligence agencies do all sorts of ugly things for national security purposes, many of which would be illegal if done in any other context. That's why we have restrictions on what the CIA can do inside the U.S. The very idea that we would prosecute a CIA officer for making sure that information damaging to America remains secret is crazy, and is typical of a blind legalistic attitude found among those who think nothing of crippling U.S. intelligence gathering capabilities. Fortunately even the Obama Justice Department has enough sense not subscribe to such an idea.
I do find it amusing that some in the defence department said that water boarding wasn't really torture. Was it Rumsfeld who publicly "experienced" it?
ReplyDeleteNow we have someone conceding that video of it actually used would be "devastating". No one's questing whether it's torture now, it seems...
The idea that CIA agents can do illegal things because they're not in the US is a pretty obtuse world-view. What will you think when another great power's agents start doing such things in the US?
ReplyDelete"The idea that CIA agents can do illegal things because they're not in the US is a pretty obtuse world-view."
ReplyDeleteReally? Why? Have you ever heard of situational ethics? And it seems to me that you're conflating legal with moral.
Now, I haven't looked at the "actionable intelligence" Cheney and co. claim to have obtained from KSM and co. But I can assure you, that had another terrorist attack succeeded on American soil, you'd have masses of people in a fury demanding that any enemies we capture be promptly and thoroughly interrogated - with little regard for their so-called "rights" and comforts.
"Now we have someone conceding that video of it actually used would be "devastating". No one's questing whether it's torture now, it seems... "
ReplyDeleteSo what? I've always argued that waterboarding was a form of torture.
"The idea that CIA agents can do illegal things because they're not in the US is a pretty obtuse world-view. "
No, it's called reality. That's exactly why intelligence agencies exist, to conduct illegal actions. Do you think espionage is a legal activity? Do you understand the concept of "human intelligence and what all that entails (not to mention all sorts of other covert activities)?
"What will you think when another great power's agents start doing such things in the US? "
Other power's agents have long operated in the U.S. If U.S. citizens belonging to a terrorist group carry out a 9/11 style attack on some other country, and that country decides to waterboard a captured leader, I'll have no problem with their action.