It is driving the rightist prohibitionists crazy that none of the dire predictions they made about ending Marijuana prohibition have come to pass. In fact the outcomes have been the exact opposite to what they said would happen. So now they are trying to get the conservative majority on the Supreme Court to reverse what the people themselves voted for. It is not clear how this will play out but it has the potential to create a massive crisis of governance.
The U.S. Department of State has blocked the publication of a long-awaited documentary history of U.S. covert action in Iran in the 1950s out of concern that its release could adversely affect ongoing negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. The controversial Iran history volume, part of the official Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series, had been slated for release last summer. (“History of 1953 CIA Covert Action in Iran to be Published,”
1“not an effective means of acquiring intelligence” 2“rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness” 3“brutal and far worse than the CIA represented” 4“conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher” 5“repeatedly provided inaccurate information” 6“actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight” 7“impeded effective White House oversight” 8“complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions” 9“impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General” 10“coordinated the release of classified information to the media” 11“unprepared as it began operating” 12“deeply flawed throughout the program's duration” 13“overwhelmingly outsourced operations” 14“coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved” 15“did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained” 16“failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness” 17“rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable” 18“ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections” 19“inherently unsustainable” 20“damaged the United States' standing in the world”
CIA director John Brennan, having failed to block the release of the Senate intelligence committee’s report on torture and abuse, is now abetting the efforts of former CIA directors and deputy directors to rebut the report’s conclusions that the interrogation techniques amounted to sadism and that senior CIA officials lied to the White House, the Congress, and the Department of Justice about the effectiveness of the enhanced interrogation program. Former CIA directors George Tenet and Michael Hayden and deputy directors John McLaughlin and Steve Kappes, who were guilty of past deceit on sensitive issues, have threatened to make documents available to undermine the findings of the Senate committee. The senior operations officer who ran the CIA’s torture and abuse program, Jose Rodriquez, has been permitted to write a book and a long essay in the Washington Post that argue the interrogation techniques were legal and effective. Their charges are completely spurious and their credibility is non-existent. Read more.
The release of the executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program is, among other things, an epic act of record preservation. Numerous CIA records that might not have been disclosed for decades, or ever, were rescued from oblivion by the Senate report and are now indelibly cited and quoted, even if many of them are not yet released in full. That’s not a small thing, since the history of the CIA interrogation program was not a story that the Agency was motivated or equipped to tell. Read more.
