John Hudson — Exclusive: Former Spies Launch ‘CIASavedLives.com’ to Combat Torture Report

With the Senate gearing up to release a sharply critical report about the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation and detention practices, a group of former senior intelligence officials is planning to rebut those criticisms with a flurry of op-eds, media interviews, and newly declassified documents. The backbone of the media campaign will be a newly launched website with a rather blunt and straightforward title: “CIASavedLives.com.” 

“It’s a one-stop shopping place for the other side,” Bill Harlow, a top CIA spokesman during the George W. Bush administration, told Foreign Policy. “With the website … we’ll be able to put out newly declassified documents, documents that were previously released but not well read, and host a repository for op-eds and media appearances by various officials.” 

Joined by other senior CIA alumni, including former directors Michael Hayden and George Tenet, Harlow is coordinating an aggressive response to the release of the 500-page executive summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, which includes new and disturbing details about the scale and severity of the Bush administration’s enhanced interrogation program. With the summary expected to drop on Tuesday, Harlow plans to make his site live the very same day.

George Bush: "These are patriots and whatever the report says, if it diminishes their contributions to our country, it is way off base."

Um, same can be said for the SS, Gestapo, Stasi, and KGB officers. And who ordered this? Torture is a crime against humanity, and the perps belong in a dock at The Hague.

Foreign Policy (registration may be required)

Exclusive: Former Spies Launch ‘CIASavedLives.com’ to Combat Torture Report
John Hudson

More seriously, this is part of a pattern of failure to enforce the law that includes failure to hold Wall Street accountable for fraud and failure to hold police accountable for brutality. The result is loss of legitimacy for law and government domestically and erosion of soft power abroad.

See Tom Carter, The CIA torture report and the crisis of legitimacy in the United States, at WSWS.

Conflicts over the release of a long-delayed US Senate investigation reportinto the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program have produced a deepening crisis for the Obama administration. Under conditions where the expanding repressive apparatus of the American state—from the CIA and the NSA down to local police departments—is increasingly viewed as illegitimate, there are growing concerns in ruling circles about the international and domestic consequences of the public release of a report exposing systematic criminality at the highest levels.

The implications for American imperialist foreign policy are obvious. The government of the United States asserts the power to invade, bomb and carry out “humanitarian intervention” and “regime-change” anywhere in the world in the name of protecting “human rights.” Meanwhile, top military, civilian and intelligence officials of that same country are implicated in the gravest violations of human rights, as well as in conspiracies to cover up those crimes—and nobody has been held accountable.

See also Matt Taibbi, The Police in America Are Becoming Illegitimate, at Rolling Stone. As a government loses legitimacy in the eyes of the people, either it must resort to force to impose order, or face anarchy. The rise of libertarianism, both left and right, is evidence of this happening.

Also, digby, The president of the ACLU wants Obama to pardon the torturers, at Hullabaloo.

And it makes some sad sense.

Also, digby, Bracing for reprisals

Evidently, the CIA is bracing for terrorist attacks against their employees when the torture report is made public