As I noted in this post, today John Brennan will try to convince Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss that their (well, really McCain and the Democrats’) 6,000 page report documenting that torture didn’t work and CIA lied to Congress (and the White House and DOJ and the public) about it not working.
Here’s the basis on which Brennan will stake his claim that SSCI’s report is wrong.
The CIA report catalogues errors that teams of agency analysts found in the committee’s research. It also questions the panel’s methodology, noting that the committee collected millions of internal CIA cables and other documents on the interrogation program, but it did not interview anyone directly involved.
Never mind that the CIA chose not to make its officials available to the committee. Never mind that John Kiriakou made it clear that the cables describing Abu Zubaydah’s torture, at least, both downplayed the number of times he had been waterboarded and exaggerated how effectively it worked.
The CIA will make the case that if you were to read millions of their cables recording their intelligence programs, you would have a grossly distorted understanding of those programs. CIA will make the case that nothing true they do is written down.
Or something like that.
Now, there’s abundant evidence the conclusions of the SSCI report are actually correct, no matter what torturers would say if asked.
But I do think it ought to raise at least as many concerns to be told that the millions of CIA cables and other documentation SSCI read doesn’t convey the truth about what CIA is doing.
Hell, I think John Brennan just made the case that the lawyers for Gitmo detainees who were held by the CIA need to interview all of the CIA personnel in person.