It has been more than one week since the US Senate released its devastating report on CIA torture and criminality, but if you turned on the television on Sunday morning, it looked frighteningly like the year 2002. Virtually all the Sunday talk shows led off not with those who documented the CIA’s depravity, or the victims of such abuse, or those who objected to torture when it was not fashionable to do so. Instead, they continued to pump up the former Bush administration architects of this illegal programme, so they could once be given a platform to defend it.
The US news media has treated Dick Cheney and Michael Hayden better in interviews last week than they treat British royalty on an American vacation. It was rather fitting that it was NBC’s Meet the Press giving Cheney so much time to defend the US government’s torturing of innocent people on Sunday. This is, after all, the same hour of television during which Cheney first announced the Bush administration would work from “the dark side” after 9/11, foreshadowing the CIA’s torture regime that was exposed in all its depraved detail last week.
This is the same venerated news show on which Cheney originally pushed the fake Al Qaida link to Saddam Hussain that led to the Iraq war, based on false evidence that the Senate confirmed last week was partly extracted through torture . But Cheney, whose former communications director once openly admitted that Meet the Press was the go-to PR platform for his most brazen lies, really outdid himself last Sunday. Saying that Cheney is unrepentant for torture would be the understatement of the week. Beyond saying he would do it all over again, the former vice-president was asked about the almost 25 per cent of the detainees in the CIA torture programme who were later declared innocent. He has no remorse. Cheney said: “I have no problem as long as we achieve our objective. And our objective is to get the guys who did 9/11 and it is to avoid another attack against the US. I was prepared and we did.
Hayden, the loquacious and increasingly outrageous former CIA director, appeared on ABC’s This Week around the same time as Cheney, and while his answers may have been delivered with a smile rather than a scowl, his words were just as infuriating. “They were successful. That’s historical fact,” Hayden said of the CIA’s torture sessions, ignoring the mountains of evidence to the contrary produced by the Senate. Hayden somehow continues to be the American mainstream media’s darling, despite the torture report’s last 30 pages, which consist almost exclusively of testimony Hayden gave to the Senate, right next to proof that what he said was misleading or outright false.
As Andrew Sullivan wrote last week: “How does any media institution justify having this person comment on this report? He has lied so brazenly and so often, anything he says must be treated with instant suspicion. In a rare interview in which someone actually challenged him, Hayden repeatedly defended anal rape on national television on Friday, to an incredulous and baffled Jake Tapper of CNN. Seriously, Hayden kept claiming that “rectal rehydration” — one of the CIA’s most horrifying torture techniques — was a “medical procedure”. Physicians for Human Rights, a group of actual doctors, released a statement insisting that rectal feeding is little more than “sexual assault masquerading as medical treatment”.
Numerous other respected medical professionals seconded that: “There is absolutely no medical value to what the CIA is accused of doing, to what it appears was being made up on the fly. Maybe next time Hayden is on television ... someone should read him the US Justice Department’s official definition of ‘forcible rape’: The penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim’.” As Human Rights Watch director Ken Roth stated matter-of-factly: “That’s what CIA did.” Even John Yoo can’t support that. Meanwhile, most of the media can still barely say the word “torture” without using some ridiculously awkward workaround instead, let alone quote the domestic and international law statutes that unequivocally outlaw it. And no one in Congress seems interested in pushing for prosecutions ... because it’s “too difficult”.
Instead, the subject of justifiable punishment — of what to do about this dark history and its spawn — has been immediately replaced in our conversation about torture by endless arguments about whether “it worked”. To torture supporters, it doesn’t matter that the Senate report methodically and systematically took apart any claims that torture ever worked. That’s the argument they want. So of course current CIA director John Brennan said at a press conference the other day that it will be up “to future policymakers” to decide whether to torture again in the future, rather than the anti-war crimes statute or the anti-torture treaty Ronald Reagan signed a generation ago. But this “debate” has probably been a good dress rehearsal for Brennan, who someday will likely have to attempt doing all he can to avoid discussing the legality of torture’s successor at the CIA: the drone strike programme.
And maybe that is why Barack Obama insists on sticking by him, despite so many calls for Brennan’s resignation. Ever since journalists started exposing the torture programme in the mid-2000s, “the CIA began to see its future”, the New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti wrote in his book on the agency, “not as a the long-term jailers of America’s enemies, but as a military organisation that could erase them”.
Ramped up tenfold during the Obama administration, the drone programme has killed an untold number of innocent people — in wedding convoys and funeral processions and elsewhere — and led to massive amounts of collateral damage in the name of anti-terrorism. From Meet the Press to Morning Joe and elsewhere on the pundit circuit, it is the deflecting question Bush administration supporters have been sarcastically asking about Obama: Where is the drone report?
The question is meant as a sardonic insult to avoid any responsibility for the CIA’s crimes during the Bush years, but it is also a valid one. There should be a comprehensive investigation — right now, rather than a decade from now — into drones. Unfortunately, the people in charge of American accountability on torture are also the CIA’s biggest allies when it comes to American ingenuity in killing.
Just because Obama and Brennan have not experienced a reckoning for their robotic assassination programme — yet — does not mean we should excuse away the things done in our name now. Cheney belongs in jail, not in a comfy chair on American television. No amount of deflecting will change that.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
