Read the torture report! // James Fallows

The more who read the torture report the better
by James Fallows //The Atlantic

Thick, footnote-laden reports from official government bodies have played a surprisingly important role in shaping American policy and public opinion. ...The Torture Committee report of 2014 should have the same effect. I say "should" in an exhortative rather than necessarily predictive sense, though I hope both apply. You should read this document, and you should demand changes and accountability.

Technically the report is known as the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Study of the Central Intelligence Agency's Detention and Interrogation Program. You can read the 500-plus pages of the "executive summary" and other working papers at this WaPo site or this from the NYT or elsewhere. It should—and I say this in the predictive sense—henceforth be known as the Torture Committee report.

One way to put its findings is: Whatever you thought was out of control and abusive about the all-fronts approach to the "global war on terror," it was worse than that. Another way is: Whatever damage you thought the United States was doing to its own values, its standing in the world, and its system of checks and accountability, it was doing more.

Read it yourself. There is no other way to absorb the scale and relentlessness of the abuses it chronicles. And this is from the heavily "redacted" version, with working papers presumably to follow. Start reading.

The architects of America's self-destructive over-response to a shocking and unprecedented attack will always bear the responsibility for the path they set the country on. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, Tenet, Bremer, Franks, and others including, yes, Powell will always be the ones who launched America into a war it should not have fought and who embraced tactics that, in the long run, have damaged America more profoundly than the original, profoundly damaging assault did. (Before you ask, these are not convenient retrospective judgments on my part but points I was arguing at the time. For instance in 2002, in early 2004 and in late 2004, and in 2006.) Although the 2000 presidential election was more an affront to the norms of democracy, as five Supreme Court justices stepped in to declare a winner, the 2004 election was more consequential for the United States internationally. By the margin of fewer than 120,000 votes in Ohio, the world's oldest democracy decided to return to power the leaders who had started the Iraq War, the results of which were already in ashes, and had run Abu Ghraib.*

Democracy depends on accountability, and accountability depends on knowledge. The Torture Committee report is potentially an enormous step forward. But only if people read it.