CIA OBAMA CENSORSHIP OF SENATE REPORT

CIA attempts to censor report into its use, abuse of torture Jamie Seidel, agencies News Corp Australia Network August 12, 2014 11:43AM CHARGED with using “brutal” interrogation methods, the CIA is now engaged in a desperate campaign to keep the details from becoming public. It’s even gone so far as to spy on the US Senate in its efforts. The political storm erupted early last week when powerful Intelligence Committee members protested over the Obama administration’s censorship of the 500-page executive summary of their findings of CIA ‘interrogation’ techniques. The full 6300 page document will never be made public. It was the end product of an examination expected to take six months. It’s since dragged on for five years. The report’s findings are said to be scathing. It is believed to state that the CIA’s ethical and legal breaches were “widespread” and “chilling”. It also is expected to rule that the CIA’s use of waterboarding and other ‘enhanced’ interrogation methods had not proved effective. But we now may never know for certain. Allegations are that the CIA is striving to delete enough key details to make the report incomprehensible — even though many of them have already been made public. “Try reading a novel with 15 per cent of the words blacked out. It can’t be done properly,” Senator Martin Heinrich said in his criticism of the attempted censorship. “Redactions are supposed to remove names or anything that could compromise sources and methods, not to undermine the source material so that it is impossible to understand.” So what is the CIA so keen to hide? What lies beneath the thousands of lines of black ink which will blank out so much of the summary? Why would the White House even allow the CIA to censor a report into its own misconduct? Ultimately it’s the US President who decides what should be marked as classified, and what should be public. The ball is now in President Barak Obama’s court. Here’s what US security analysis’s suspect the the CIA wants to hide: DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE: The whole Intelligence Committee investigation would never have happened if it was not for the destruction of key evidence. In one key incident that has been revealed, a CIA official destroyed more than 100 video recordings of the interrogations at the centre of the controversy. [...] WHEN IS TORTURE NOT TORTURE: The Bush administration insisted it wasn’t. The Obama administration says it was. At the heart of the report is whether or not the CIA knew their “enhanced” interrogation was actually torture ... [...] SUPPRESSING DETAILS: We know at least 10 types of torture the CIA applied to its captives. These were listed in the now infamous Justice Department “torture memo” and other evidence which came to light in a 2009 legal review of the allegations. But some speculate that the CIA is now particularly worried about the inherent cruelty of two previously unreported “improvised” interrogation methods ... [...] DELETING CODE NAMES: They’re just code names — acronyms and random words which are designed to disguise the subject to which they refer. But there’s something revealing even about these that the CIA wants to hide. One anonymous government source told US media the CIA was keen to blank-out any indication of name or place. This would remove any form of context for individual events. One would be indistinguishable from another. ... [...] REMOVING MENTION OF SOURCES: This may suggest something of an “own goal” by the CIA in its misinformation campaign. It appears much of the information said to have been gained via ‘enhanced interrogation’ techniques was not. Instead, it was gathered by other means — means the CIA sought to mask behind the brutal face of torture. HIDING MEDIA MANIPULATION: It bears all the hallmarks of an al-Qaeda operation. Sound familiar? It should. It’s a favourite phrase used to invoke international fear and justify CIA actions. But the report appears to reveal that the organisation deliberately leaked false threats and success stories in order to justify the existence of its torture campaigns. Such revelations would deal a severe blow to the agency’s future credibility. EMBARRASSING INCIDENTS: Where the CIA Inspector General’s investigations into CIA behaviour credible? What of specific CIA actions — such as the reported abduction of the family (including a 12-year-old girl) of an opponent of Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi? The CIA is keen to tout its successes — real or otherwise. But it has a long history of denial when it comes to failures. [...] WHITE HOUSE TO THE DEFENCE The Obama administration has sought to quash rising anger over the report’s redactions. “We tortured some folks,” President Obama conceded last week. “And we have to, as a country, take responsibility for that so that, hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.” How censoring the report which is central for imposing such accountability upon the CIA achieves this goal is the issue. [...] EXTRACTS ONLY - FULL @ SOURCE Source - Herald Sun - here

Go to the source and check out the article in full.

Got some really cool pics, too.

There's a massive one of Brennan and I was right:  he looks mean.  LOL

Surprised this is news in Australia and that it's not exactly complimentary.

The public will never know what's going on or have a say on how their country is run.

Even when the government is supposedly moving towards accountability, they're hiding things from the public they're supposed to serve.