Yahoo.com News is reporting:
The CIA and several of its past leaders are stepping up a campaign to discredit a five-year Senate investigation into the CIA’s harrowing interrogation practices after 9/11, concerned that the historical record may define them as torturers instead of patriots and expose them to legal action around the world.
The Senate intelligence committee’s report doesn’t urge prosecution for wrongdoing, and the Justice Department has no interest in reopening a criminal probe. But the threat to former interrogators and their superiors was underlined as a U.N. special investigator demanded those responsible for “systematic crimes” be brought to justice, and human rights groups pushed for the arrest of key CIA and Bush administration figures if they travel overseas.
What’s the purpose of a “Central Intelligence Agency” in the first place? It’s to gather information to protect individual citizens from the initiation of force by others — particularly others associated with foreign governments or terrorist organizations.
Nobody, aside from a suicidal mindset, would object to this goal. It’s certainly valid to debate the best means and methods by which to achieve this goal. But exposing secret information related to a current and ongoing threat — Islamic-inspired, Middle East-based terrorism — makes no sense at all — unless you’re against the existence of a CIA in the first place.
If you’re against the existence of such a government agency, then by all means do whatever you can to weaken it. Even then, it still might not make sense to release its recent documents, or commentary or reports based on secret documents. By releasing such information related to an ongoing, present-day war or threat, the possibility exists that information could be revealed resulting in harm to even one’s own interests. It would be like telling Hitler’s Nazis in the midst of World War II, “We hate ourselves for some of our brutality on the battlefield, but we’ll keep fighting you anyway.”
In other words, if you’re an American opposed to the existence of a central intelligence agency on principle, the fact remains that this agency has been gathering information that (if exposed) could result in a threat to your own life. By what rational or “principled” set of standards would you go ahead and release or comment on this classified information — unless self-destruction and literal self-sacrifice is the principle by which you operate?
These are very fundamental questions evaded by most in this current CIA controversy. If you read the news, you’re led to believe that it’s essentially a partisan dispute between Senate Democrats who place the ideals of the nation even above personal safety — and recalcitrant Republicans who have no principled alternative other than partisan anger. If you only watch or read the news superficially — with almost no objective thought at all — then I guess I can see how such an impression would register. Democrats talking about morality and Republicans looking frightened, defensive and strained; that sums up about any political dispute in our nation’s capital at any time.
It’s way deeper than that, and this is the problem. Nobody talks about what the fundamental issues really are in this whole CIA controversy.
When you live in apparent or actual physical safety, it’s pretty easy to be moralistic. It’s quite easy, especially in front of approving colleagues or self-proclaimed moral authorities, to say or imply, “America should be better than that. We shouldn’t reduce ourselves to torturing even our worst, most cruel or violent enemies.” And a case can certainly be made for never doing more than what’s absolutely required to achieve justice and attain physical safety.
However, life is not always so simple or obvious. If you were the sudden victim of a home invasion, a car-jacking or some other violent crime, who’s to say how far you’d need to go in order to protect the life of yourself and your family? War situations are even more complex, and today’s secrecy-based terrorist schemes are more complex still. How is it logically possible to both (a) have a secret intelligence agency and, (b) reveal that agency’s secrets at will whenever it suits the political purposes at a particular point in time, and while the war over which the secrets were obtained is still going on?
Also, there’s a matter of context-dropping here. Context-dropping refers to applying the same abstract (e.g. moral) position to two completely and fundamentally different situations. The United States, while not infallible (nobody is), still stands for the protection of individual rights. Its government is acting to retaliate against events like 9/11 and prevent them from happening again. This fundamentally differs from the actions of governments or organizations such as ISIS, Hamas, al Qaeda or any other entity openly committed to initiating physical harm against others. If you believe there’s no such thing as a good guy or a bad guy — a right side or a wrong side — then context-dropping probably does seem justified here. But if you don’t believe there is a right side, and you think that al Qaeda or ISIS are no different morally from the United States, then you’ve got a much greater evasion with which to deal.
I’m not suggesting that any government agency is, or should be, unaccountable for its actions. But at the end of the day, we either have an agency of secret intelligence, or we don’t. If that agency is in any way used to investigate or stop the actions of peace-loving American citizens, that would be a scandal of Constitutional importance and should be exposed right away. But if that agency is actually involved in stopping a terrorist from killing innocent American citizens, at home or abroad, then by what means do we micromanage them to the point where that agency is rendered impotent and ineffective? And what’s wrong with people — morally and psychologically — who care just as much, if not even more, for the well-being and feelings of terrorist-plotting attackers as for their intended victims?
A lot of people believe that morality consists of rising above your enemy, even if you die in the process. Other people (myself included) believe that in a battle between good and evil (where evil is defined as the initiator of force) you do whatever you have to do in order to survive, win and ensure safety.
I suppose we all must decide where we stand on that particular moral principle before registering an opinion about the CIA’s actions, one way or the other.
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