Tag: Ron Wyden

IF YOU CAN’T TRUST THE CIA, WHO CAN YOU TRUST?

SSS say it ain’t so. The CIA wouldn’t do such a thing.

Do the ends justify the means? Were there even any ends to justify?

Via David Stockman’s Contra Corner

Senator Wyden: Americans Will Be Profoundly Disturbed By Report On CIA Interrogations

By Bryan Denson | [email protected]

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden explained today why he voted to declassify the Senate Intelligence Committee’s apparently scathing 6,200-page report on the CIA’s detention and brutal interrogation of overseas terrorism suspects.

“I believe the American people will be profoundly disturbed by the contents of this report,” the senior senator from Oregon wrote in a news release. “Though I can’t provide any details until that declassification process is finished, I can say that the American people will see that much of what CIA officials have said about the effectiveness of coercive interrogations was simply untrue.”

The Washington Post reported this week that the Intelligence Committee’s report concludes “that the CIA misled the government and the public about aspects of its brutal interrogation program for years — concealing details about the severity of its methods, overstating the significance of plots and prisoners, and taking credit for critical pieces of intelligence that detainees had in fact surrendered before they were subjected to harsh techniques.”

U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein called out Director of Central Intelligence on what she perceived as CIA efforts to impede the Senate investigation, offering an excoriation of the agency’s top lawyer. A boiled-down version of her floor speech can be found here.

“I have spoken about the intelligence leadership’s culture of misinformation before and it continues to be a problem to this day,” Wyden said in his news statement. “I have also been asking questions publicly for years about the role that outside contractors played in the interrogation program and I hope the American people will soon get some answers to those questions.”

Wyden, a senior member of the Intelligence Committee, urged the Obama administration to declassify the Senate report swiftly.

“It is going to make many people uncomfortable,” he wrote, “but getting the facts about torture out to the American people will keep these mistakes from being repeated and make our national intelligence agencies stronger and more effective in the long run.”

Sen. Wyden: Americans will be ‘profoundly disturbed’ by report on CIA’s terrorist interrogations

QUOTES OF THE DAY

“It is a fundamental principle of American democracy that laws should not be public only when it is convenient for government officials to make them public. They should be public all the time, open to review by adversarial courts, and subject to change by an accountable legislature guided by an informed public. If Americans are not able to learn how their government is interpreting and executing the law then we have effectively eliminated the most important bulwark of our democracy. That’s why, even at the height of the Cold War, when the argument for absolute secrecy was at its zenith, Congress chose to make US surveillance laws public. Without public laws, and public court rulings interpreting those laws, it is impossible to have informed public debate. And when the American people are in the dark, they can’t make fully informed decisions about who should represent them, or protest policies that they disagree with. These are fundamentals. It’s Civics 101. And secret law violates those basic principles. It has no place in America.”
― Ron Wyden

“Authorities this broad give the national security bureaucracy the power to scrutinize the personal lives of every law-abiding American. Allowing that to continue is a grave error that demonstrates a willful ignorance of human nature. Moreover, it demonstrates a complete disregard for the responsibilities entrusted to us by the Founding Fathers to maintain robust checks and balances on the power of any arm of the government. That obviously raises some very serious questions. What happens to our government, our civil liberties and our basic democracy if the surveillance state is allowed to grow unchecked? As we have seen in recent days, the intelligence leadership is determined to hold on to this authority. Merging the ability to conduct surveillance that reveals every aspect of a person’s life with the ability to conjure up the legal authority to execute that surveillance, and finally, removing any accountable judicial oversight, creates the opportunity for unprecedented influence over our system of government.”
― Ron Wyden

“It’s very, very difficult I think for us to have a transparent debate about secret programs approved by a secret court issuing secret court orders based on secret interpretations of the law.”
― Tom Udall