Former CIA and National Security Agency director Michael Hayden has long been the face and voice of the growing security state within the United States. While many of his representations have been challenged, he continues (like Dick Cheney) to create his own reality to justify powers viewed as authoritarian and unlawful. Now, with the approaching release of a comprehensive report on the torture program, Hayden is out in the press denying the findings of the report that torture did not result in any meaningful new intelligence and that the CIA tortured people who were already cooperating with conventional (and legal) interrogations. Hayden took to the airways to champion torture by attacking the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D, Cal.) and said that she was just being “emotional” and should not be involved in such a serious debate.
On “Fox News Sunday,” Hayden cited comments Feinstein made last month that the report would “ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted.” That was just Feinstein being “emotional” Hayden insisted: “That sentence — that motivation for the report — may show deep, emotional feeling on the part of the senator, but I don’t think it leads you to an objective report.”
It was an ironic moment since Feinstein has been widely denounced by civil libertarians for her blind support for the intelligence community, including her campaign against Edward Snowden and her defense of massive surveillance programs targeting the entire population in meta data collection. When she was granting the security agencies their every wish, she was pragmatic and powerful. However, once she allowed an investigation into torture, she became emotional and incompetent. Of course, under Hayden’s approach, the United Nations, various countries, numerous human rights organizations, and former government officials are equally blinded by their emotions in denouncing the torture program — and our failure to prosecute former Bush officials.
It is equally telling that Hayden views the condemnation of torture to be a purely emotional response. Torture is a war crime as well as a domestic crime. It is like saying that a prosecutor is a bit too emotional in denouncing murder. Normal people tend to have a certain emotion over torture. We had some pretty powerful emotions when we tried Japanese officers for water boarding our POWs. Hayden made his career by dismissing questions of illegality as emotional tripe.
Ironically, Hayden is my neighbor down the street from my house. The few houses that separate us are nothing like the “emotional” divide over war crimes. I still strongly oppose the record of Feinstein in the expansion of national security powers in this country. However, having Michael Hayden as a critic on the subject of torture is a good step toward redemption.
Source: Washington Post
One can only hope that Mark Udall and Ron Wyden are having more influence over Feinstein than John McCain and Saxby Chambliss.
swarthmoremom – the Democrats, big D, control, the Senate and the Senate Intelligence Comm. Without their votes nothing happens. Without Feinstein nothing happens. Just remember, when the camel gets its nose under the tent, soon you have the whole damn camel in the tent. 🙂
Annie – Sheriff Joe has plenty of tents to expand his prison system. He can make it as big as it needs to be. Now, if they are declared political prisoners, the UN will see them as martyrs. You do not want to do that.
Dredd – somebody banned you. How awful. You are the last person I would have thought of being banned from a site.
Condemn every democrat seems to be the meme. .. really no room for debate, laser.
Just how big will this political prison need to be?
If Hayden is a war criminal, so is Obama and every Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Comm. You take one, you take them all.
Why condemn Diane? Because she authorized and approved of torture.
To be serious about having done that means to hold oneself accountable to the rule of law. Anything else is indeed a smokescreen. She isn’t shaking up anything, she’s covering her own actions over. You can tell what is real by looking at actions, and ignoring BS!
Why do we worry if Diane is replaced by an alien? The facts are that she did approve torture. She did this. Now we should ask what it means to show remorse for that action. Words are CHEAP, and like Hayden’s, relevant only in a court of law.
Except for all the spelling errors. Glad you were able to decipher it. 😳
I blame working a night shift and not enough sleep. Do you buy it?
Jill
I agree with rafflaw, Hayden is a war criminal. His thoughts on his war crimes and the war crimes of others should be heard in a court of law. Otherwise, they are irrelevant to anything.
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Well said.
rafflaw
Mr. Hayden is a war criminal and why should we be listening to a war criminal?
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Exactly.
He took an oath to protect the Constitution, not the Pentagon traitor class.
rafflaw – President Obama took an oath to obey the Constitution and uphold the law of the country and look where that got us.
Annie
It’s a commen tactic when attempting to discredit or marginalized a female by saying she is too emotional, ‘hysterical’.
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Well said.
It is “codespeak.”
Eugene Robinson: Share the torture report
BrevardCounty 4:57 p.m. EDT April 7, 2014
http://www.floridatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/04/07/eugene-robinson-share-torture-report/7434889/
“Torture is immoral, illegal and irreconcilable with this nation’s most cherished values. If defenders of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program disagree, they should come out and say so. Instead, they blow smoke.
Sexist smoke, at that: Former CIA Director Michael Hayden said Sunday that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., is being “emotional” rather than “objective” as the intelligence committee, which Feinstein heads, moves toward release of a comprehensive report on CIA detention and torture during the George W. Bush administration.
Feinstein coolly responded that the report is indeed “objective, based on fact, thoroughly footnoted, and I am certain it will stand on its own merits. … The only direction I gave staff was to let the facts speak for themselves.”
Those facts, from what we know so far, are appalling.
Feinstein’s committee voted 11-3 last week to declassify the report’s 400-page executive summary, with ranking Republican member Saxby Chambliss of Georgia and several of his GOP colleagues joining the Democratic majority.
President Obama will face renewed pressure from the torture program’s defenders to quash the whole thing, and it may be months before even the summary is publicly released. It is unclear whether the full 6,000-page report will ever be declassified.
This is an outrage.
It was Justice Louis D. Brandeis who remarked that “sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants.” Torture is a stain on this nation’s honor that can only be bleached away by full exposure. Feinstein’s committee spent years finding out what really happened. I should have a right to know what my government did in my name.
The Washington Post last week quoted unnamed sources as saying the Senate report concludes the CIA “misled the government and the public” about the torture program. According to the Post, the agency downplayed the “severity” of its interrogation methods, overstated the significance of some prisoners and took credit for information that detainees had actually surrendered under legal, non-coercive questioning.
These leaked disclosures prompted another round of the endless “Does torture work?” debate. This is precisely what the defenders of torture want us to focus on, since it keeps us away from the central issue.
Jose Rodriguez Jr., who headed the CIA’s National Clandestine Service and ran the program of clandestine detention and harsh interrogation, wrote in the Post that the undertaking “produced critical intelligence that helped decimate al-Qaida and save American lives.”
Rodriguez specifically defends the CIA’s treatment of an al-Qaida operative known as Abu Zubaida, who was subjected to waterboarding — a form of torture that involves simulated drowning — 83 times. But according to the Post, the Senate report establishes that most of the useful information that came from Abu Zubaida was extracted by an FBI interrogator using normal techniques, before the CIA whisked the man away for waterboarding.
Ultimately, the debate about torture’s effectiveness is a waste of time because neither side can definitively prove its case.
But can the defenders of “enhanced interrogation” point to a single piece of information obtained under torture and say, with certainty, that it couldn’t have been extracted any other way? No, they can’t.
This is an argument about worldviews, not about facts, and it ignores the heart of the matter. The reason to fully examine the CIA’s torture program isn’t that it was ineffective. It’s that it was immoral.
Torture is also illegal under U.S. and international law, and while Bush administration lawyers produced opinions sanctioning the practice, those who were involved are clearly worried about their potential exposure. It was Rodriguez who ordered the destruction of videotapes recording the interrogations of Abu Zubaida and another detainee, which kept them out of the hands of nosy Senate investigators.
The CIA wasn’t able to destroy all the evidence, though. Among many unanswered questions, I want to know whether trained medical personnel attended the torture sessions. I’m sure the relevant professional associations and licensing boards would like to know as well.
The report is written. Only when Feinstein — in her cool and unemotional way — gets to share it with the nation can we begin to put this most hideous of episodes behind us.
Email Robinson at eugenerobinson@washpost.com.”
Laser, Feinstein has largely given the national securiiy state and its abuses a free pass but if she wants to change things up why condemn her? Her term is until 2018 but she very well could be replaced by a republican in 2015.
swarthmoremom and Jill;
The two of ye can be the debaters of this history.
Jill’s remarks just prior to this comment (if facts are there supportive);
would seem to go with the Feinstein I know.
At the same time, I’m always amazed at how we can ignore bad faith;
because the person(s) involved are part of another “we” clan.
As for me, I know much more than most about the REAL B.O;
which is why I know – he ain’t perfect.
You two should square off and let’s see what is revealed.
Diane Feinstein’s sudden horror at torture makes no sense. She has known the details for years. Along with Pelosi, she has been instrumental in its use by approving it. Therefore it would seem that her sudden horror is more of a smoke screen than anything. Perhaps she hopes people will no longer see her as a person involved in torture?
Democrats have declared this, “the time of the woman!” Women are strong because they can access their emotions. They will use their feelings to sweep up the mess made by the boys!
The reason I know there isn’t real remorse by Diane is because actual feeling of remorse results in real actions. Those actions would be resigning from her position and standing before a court of law. They would include telling everything one knows about what one did, approved and what went on. Instead of these actions, we have the jingo of women’s emotions–a hook that works beautifully in this, “time of the woman!”.
Well this woman is not falling for jingos and words. Real remorse is shown in action and by deed, not by words of oneself or others.
Participation in the approval of torture requires the action of resignation and presentation before the court. Those are the only actions that count. What was done was horrific. This cannot be reduced to jingos. People died hideous deaths. One should feel terrible for having participated in any of it. One should come clean.
Instead we will see a small fraction of the report–a few hundred pages out of a thousand. And we will see that information put to propaganda, not to justice. As citizens, we should demand justice.
“Strong and bitter words indicate a weak cause.”
— Victor Hugo
I agree with Hayden. Period
For some reason Mr. Hayden’s comments remind me of this: