WHO’S “EMOTIONAL”— FEINSTEIN OR THE C.I.A.?
Who gets “emotional” about torture—or, rather, what is the proper emotional response to a history of torture and lies? On Fox News, on Sunday morning, Chris Wallace asked Michael Hayden, the former director of the C.I.A., about a report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sixty-three hundred pages long, that “says the C.I.A. misled the public about the severity and the success of the enhanced interrogation program.” Hayden’s first response was to talk about the feelings of Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the committee, citing an article by David Ignatius: “He said Senator Feinstein wanted a report so scathing that it would ‘ensure that an un-American brutal program of detention and interrogation would never again be considered or permitted.’ ”
Now, that sentence, that motivation for the report, Chris, may show deep emotional feeling on part of the senator. But I don’t think it leads you to an objective report.
“Deep emotional feelings,” on the part of a woman like Feinstein, are apparently dizzying, especially when it comes to things like our integrity as a nation. But are Hayden and his former colleagues at the C.I.A., in touch with their own emotions on this one? The Senate voted on Thursday to submit the report for declassification; this process may take a while, because the White House and the C.I.A. will be involved, and the agency has fought the report. It has made its objections known feelingly, in a rebuttal that is also classified, in testimony, and in leaks to reporters about how the Senate just doesn’t understand what it was like—doesn’t get it, doesn’t care about what bad days its agents had. Not that the C.I.A. wants to tell. When John Brennan, the current head of the C.I.A., realized that the Senate investigators had some of the agency’s notes to itself—the so-called Panetta papers, in which, according to Senator Feinstein, the agency conceded points it is now denying—he had a bit of a fit. Feinstein said that the committee got the Panetta papers from the C.I.A. in a document dump; the agency said that even if it did, the committee ought to have known that those notes were private. It apparently searched the Senate’s computers and tried to get a criminal investigation started. Calling the cops is, admittedly, a common fantasy when an teen-ager realizes that his journal has been read, but it’s a bit unworthy of an intelligence agency when dealing with its congressional overseers.
Now, not that there’s anything wrong with wanting a scathing report in torture that will shock the conscience, but it’s probably worth noting that the Ignatius line Hayden cited took a Feinstein quote slightly out of context. (Though the layering of emotionalism is on Hayden.) Ignatius wrote that Feinstein “wanted a report so tough that it would ‘ensure that an un-American, brutal program of detention and interrogation will never again be considered or permitted,’ as she put it.” She had actually presented this as the reason to make the report public:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2014/04/dianne-feinstein-emotions-and-the-cia.html?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
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