When the head of the CIA's torture unit decided to destroy videotapes of his team's horrific work, he unwittingly set in motion events that led to the release last week of the most massive, detailed documentation of unlawful behavior by high-ranking government officials and intentional infliction of pain on noncombatants by the U.S. government since the Civil War era.
One of President George W. Bush's reasons for the 2003 invasion of Iraq was Saddam Hussein's “torture rooms.” While making this argument, Bush was secretly authorizing similar unlawful CIA behavior for similar purposes: intelligence and deterrence. Bush sounded credible when he claimed adherence to federal and international legal standards, which he could do because the torturers and their congressional regulators were sworn to secrecy to keep our enemies from knowing what the CIA is doing. The effect has been a muzzled Congress, lied to by law-breaking and rogue CIA officials. Until now.
When the Senate Intelligence Committee staff reported the videotapes' destruction to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., committee chair, she ordered an investigation to determine whether CIA officials had told her committee the truth. When Senate investigators suspected their computers had been hacked, Feinstein ordered another investigation, which revealed that the CIA was spying on its own Senate investigators.
CIA Director John Brennan denied it. But when Feinstein released incontrovertible evidence of CIA domestic spying, Brennan admitted his agents had spied on their regulators, but claimed it was needed because the regulators had exceeded their authority in examining CIA documents. Last week, Feinstein had had enough and decided to release the report with agreed-upon redactions.
The report is damning in the extreme to the Bush administration and CIA leadership. It offers proof that the CIA engaged in physical and psychological torture, some authorized — unlawfully. The report also demonstrates that CIA officials repeatedly lied to the White House and Senate regulators.
The torture lobby's most politically successful argument is that we are all safer because of these dirty deeds, which this Senate report refutes by demonstrating no serious actionable intelligence came from the torture.
All human beings possess basic inalienable rights derived from the natural law and protected by the Constitution the CIA has sworn to uphold. Torture violates all of those rights.
In a free society in which the government works for us, we have a right to know what it is doing in our names and a reasonable expectation that the laws enforced against us will be enforced against itself. But don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, is the senior judicial analyst at Fox News Channel.
