Among the many items which would have otherwise been top stories — some even meriting wall-to-wall cable news channel coverage — during last week’s Worst News Week Ever™, was the release of a landmark bi-partisan report on the use of torture by the U.S. following 9/11.
The Constitution Project’s “Task Force on Detainee Treatment” is described as “an independent, bipartisan, blue-ribbon panel charged with examining the federal government’s policies and actions related to the capture, detention and treatment of suspected terrorists during the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations.”
It is headed up by former Congressmen Asa Hutchinson (R) and James R. Jones (D). Hutchinson also served as a top official in the George W. Bush Administration.
“In many respects,” the introduction to the report explains, “this Task Force report is the examination of the treatment of suspected terrorists that official Washington has been reluctant to conduct.”
As the New York Times’ Scott Shane detailed in his barely noticed coverage last Tuesday (the day after the Boston Marathon bombing and the day before the deadly explosion at the West, TX fertilizer plant)…
The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”
…
The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means.
…
Mr. Hutchinson, who served in the Bush administration as chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration and under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he “took convincing” on the torture issue. But after the panel’s nearly two years of research, he said he had no doubts about what the United States did.
“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview.
…
“I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases,” Mr. Jones said. “We lost our compass.”
While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.
We will reserve the option of returning to this matter in the near future in more detail. But, as we’re still recovering, as you may be as well, from a horrible news hangover following last week’s Week From Hell (during which Andy Daly tweeted accurately: “When an Elvis impersonator trying to kill the President is the least interesting news story of the week, you know some shit went down”) we are going to go easy on this matter for the moment, and defer instead to the The Daily Show’s coverage of this disturbing report…just to help take the edge off things for now. You’re welcome.
Curious timing of the burying of this report and the Boston Marathon tragedy, reminds me of idiot boy and blow-your-face-off’s multiple curious timing events.
I don’t think it’s a matter of curious timing.
Shit is going on every DAY. You’d be hard pressed to find ANY successive days without overlapping shit. So I don’t look at it as conspiracy laden intertwining events. The conspiracy, to my way of thinking, is more an unconscious societal conspiracy of group fear, ignorance, and denial of the intertwining, overlapping connectedness of the whole schmear of our foreign policy, economic model, dysfunctional media and education system, etc.
Here’s the message I get:
SORRY BUT THIS VIDEO IS
UNAVAILABLE FROM YOUR LOCATION
IN CASE YOU CAN’T GIVE UP YOUR FREE HEALTHCARE AND
MOVE TO AMERICA, YOU CAN WATCH THE DAILY SHOW WITH JON STEWART
AT THE COMEDYNETWORK.CA
My response Daily Show Staff who I reckon read BradBlog.com (while not properly crediting it):
1. In case, you’re webmasters are too incompetent to create IP-detection code that automatically switches to whatever entertainment source we’re allowed to see in Canada, instead of annoying messages, we have all sorts of IP-cloaking programs at our disposal, eg Hotspot Shield
http://www.hotspotshield.com/
2. Healthcare is not “free” in Canada. It is publicly paid for, and it seems costs and potential abuses are controlled by something abhorred by the gangsters who run the United States: Regulatory Laws. Deregulation=Lawlessness. We’re starting to have that in Canada too, eg BC Hydro which has been delivered as a monopoly to an “Enron-Lite” enterprise. That is NOT free market, that is cronyism. Thank you, America.
Bush lied–Cheney lied–Rice lied–Rumsfield lied–Bush’s Dizzy Blond (now Fox commentator) lied. Bush’s administration misled the American people into a war with Iraq where 4600+ Americans died and over 100,000 Iraq’s died and the republicans still support them. Bush should be held accountable for murdering all of them. I just had something come through on Facebook that said lets keep America American and to vote either for Bush or Obama. The republican party is SICK.
Obama should have started a panel investigating torture and starting an illegal war within 30 days after he was first elected. No accountability only means it will happen again.
Sad that the only people that were punished were the lowest enlisted personnel. I guess that is standard here in the great USA.
David, I simply propose that with the mounting evidence our government secretly supports the few and not the many, we take a step back and consider without being emotionally charged the observable facts jack and an understanding of our lesser angels. 🙂 Ever hear of Ockham’s Razor?
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/General/occam.html
Leave it to the Daily Show and the Brad Blog to air these critically important facts.
Also, FWIW:
Yes, the Constitution Project release is a big deal. Sadly though, sorta doubt that it’ll be treated as the big deal it is. Just as all the shit in the report has barely been talked about, why would a report about the undesirable stuff we don’t want to talk about now be talked about? Too uncomfortable. Too threatening to business as usual. Would require self-examination. Would require change. We’d rather wait for the planet to throw us off, than deal with all that.
Ancient–But wouldn’t the simplest explanation preclude conspiracy?
David and Ancient,
I meant to draw attention to the fact that the press conference and release date of the report on torture was set in advance, so as much as I wish we could expose the collusion of the press here, the proximity in timing to the bombings and explosion was sheer coincidence (unless you are a REALLY big conspiracy theorist!!!).
Yeah, I just meant to back you up on that report being a big deal.
The bigger the issue…the bigger the deception in my book. Keep holding the propaganda’s water and call it conspiracy theory, but too many coikidinks for my palate!
Granted, just imagine if we were talking solutions…and not fear.
Another thing David, I really don’t like american response to Bradley Manning putting the truth front and center to the “please let me wear my blinders base”. It shows some Americans would rather listen to lies on both sides of the aisle.
Ancient,
Do you really think the release of the report on torture by the Constitution project was deliberately set to occur between the marathon bombings and the Waco fertilizer plant explosion?
Really?