Covert Torturers
Dana Priest isn't a Robert Fisk, not yet anyhow – and frankly I doubt she ever will be if she remains at the Post – but her story today is stellar, first-class reporting. At first glance it seems perhaps merely a coda to her recent work on the torture camps, yet her light touch at the keyboard is deceptive: this is by far the biggest torture story to date, the complete institutionalization of un-American practices at the heart of the CIA.
The quirky bureaucrat in me wants to know now, for example, is there a career specialization in torture at the Agency? Can one enter the Senior Executive Service as a torture specialist? What sorts of special allowances and perks go along with that job? And how exactly does personnel plan to help place retiring senior torture specialists – will they mostly work as consultants overseas or can suitable work be found for them here at home? Are there special torture training centers, a torture training cycle, a torture manual? What a fascinating little cancer to pick at this one is...
Other questions percolate from the back of one's mind. Nobody has enough time to do things themselves these days, so why reinvent the wheel? Surely, with such emphasis on getting immediate results through a bureaucracy of torture, the Agency must have turned to more experienced foreign parties for guidance. Who might those be? And, btw, what kinds of cooperation might the Agency and other US intelligence organs have requested from their new partners in torture vis-a-vis spying on Americans, if that subject by chance ever came up? (If I were a lawyer for one of those now contemplating requesting court review of a terrorism conviction on the grounds of warrantless NSA wiretaps I'd be curious about that.)
Usually when one party takes over from another after a presidential election there's a certain amount of housecleaning to be done. Now, it seems, we're dealing with an Augean stable (the myth has to do with the dark of the winter solstice). If, in spite of their own fecklessness, the Democrats ever retake the presidency they'll be faced with the interesting choice of incremental reforms or ninety degree course corrections. The public, sad to say, has no particularly good reason for optimism that justice will prevail.
Posted by George Kenney on December 30, 2005 7:26 AM 
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