it was a really great movie/documentary. The argument was made that Obama had just run on "putting partisanship" behind us so he didn't want to spend his time rooting out the corruption of the bush years.
What was ironic was the character Denis McDonough played by jon hamm at a Democratic caucus said that the president wanted to put all this behind them because they had just passed the ACA and if they enraged the GOP by going after the CIA that the GOP might "try to repeal the ACA, or stop control, or stop immigration reform."
I certainly hope the lesson learned from that naive statement, a decade later, is that the GOP will do what it wants, when it wants, and there is no making deals with them. They did ALL those partisan things the White House was worried about, and more.
The CIA should never have gotten into the mess of torture to begin with, but you can almost see exactly what they were thinking.
The torture is ineffective has been known for a long time. Despite being unethical, the data it produces is completely useless because the person being tortured will say anything to make it stop which is actually WORSE because now you start expending resources chasing dead end leads.
But here we are in September 2001......
The CIA is terrified of blame for 9/11, and whatever may be coming next. The failures of long past torture programs are not in their memories. Along come these snake oil salesmen contractors making the case that torture works and they can get info from prisoners. in the movie they make a presentation to the CIA and convince them by citing a study about DOGS (yes, I said dogs) that this will work.
So fear for their own jobs is reason one this happened, and now comes reason 2.... lack of time. The CIA should have done a deep dive, demanded to see their data, produced study reports for their superiors with scientific evidence, brought in lawyers to discuss the legality and politicians to discuss the ethics. But with the belief that the threat was ONGOING and another attack imminent, the torture approval was pretty much rubber stamped all the way up the chain, with one lawyer provide a flimsy defense that what they were doing was legal in his mind (detailed in the film).
Reason 3 is my own believe.......... maybe they honestly thought it would work but regardless when they realized it was NOT working, they kept going. I believe because deep down inside the people involved with this program simply ENJOYED it. They felt like "these bastards" DESERVED it for having anything to with al qaeda, and they relished in their suffering. Actually getting any information was only a secondary benefit.
In the end the contractors that swindled us walked with $80 million. The McCain/Feingold amendment put a stop to this in the future but everyone involved in the past got off scott free.
I appreciate Obama as one of the best presidents we've ever had. Maybe if he had gone after the CIA (and I think Cheney and company for the Iraq war which is/was a FAR greater crime than the CIA torture program), he would not have been able to accomplish the things he did. I don't know... there is no way to ever tell...... but I wish people had been held accountable. As it was the GOP created the tea party as a response to the ACA and used that fake outrage about "death panels" and such nonsense to take Congress away in the midterms, so I hardly think "playing nice" over Iraq/CIA helped him earn any capital with the GOP.
We see the same shit playing out today with drumpf....... just deny everything, redact everything, and you can get away with anything. I hope the next president doesn't let him or the toadies below him breaking our laws get away with it.
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