There is NO "Senate Report" on Torture; Staff Propaganda!

There is NO "Senate Report" on Torture

Two big lies have been perpetrated on the American people.

The first lie is the partisan, dishonest, irresponsible, and destructive left-wing attack disguised as an Intelligence Committee report.

The second lie is the elite media deliberately overlooking the partisan, divisive and deeply disputed report and pretending it represents the verdict of the U.S. Senate.

First, lets look at just how dishonest and deceitful this report is.

There is a 528 page "Executive Summary" of a 6,500 page classified report based on more than a million documents turned over by the Central Intelligence Agency.

These numbers tell you several things.

First, you can make money betting that no Senator has read all 6,500 pages. This is a staff-written and staff-driven document in which left-wing employees got to smear the American intelligence community without serious supervision.

Second, it is astonishing that with all those pages, the Democratic staff asked no one at the CIA about the topic.

As President Obama's Director of Central Intelligence said in yesterday's press conference, "Unfortunately, the committee could not agree on a bipartisan way forward and no CIA personnel were interviewed by the committee during the course of the investigation."

Let me repeat this to drive it home. According to the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, "NO CIA PERSONNEL WERE INTERVIEWED BY THE COMMITTEE."

If the elite media had reported on a narrowly partisan report written with no meetings with intelligence personnel people would have had a very different reaction.

The failure to proceed professionally and responsibly is highlighted in a devastating response in the Wall Street Journal from former CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden (a retired Air Force general), and former CIA Deputy Directors John McLaughlin, Albert Calland (a retired Navy vice admiral) and Stephen R. Kappes:

How did the committee report get these things so wrong? Astonishingly, the staff avoided interviewing any of us who had been involved in establishing or running the program, the first time a supposedly comprehensive Senate Select Committee on Intelligence study has been carried out in this way. 

The excuse given by majority senators is that CIA officers were under investigation by the Justice Department and therefore could not be made available. This is nonsense. The investigations referred to were completed in 2011 and 2012 and applied only to certain officers. They never applied to six former CIA directors and deputy directors, all of whom could have added firsthand truth to the study. Yet a press account indicates that the committee staff did see fit to interview at least one attorney for a terrorist at Guantanamo Bay.

We can only conclude that the committee members or staff did not want to risk having to deal with data that did not fit their construct. Which is another reason why the study is so flawed. What went on in preparing the report is clear: The staff picked up the signal at the outset that this study was to have a certain outcome, especially with respect to the question of whether the interrogation program produced intelligence that helped stop terrorists. The staff members then “cherry picked” their way through six million pages of documents, ignoring some data and highlighting others, to construct their argument against the program’s effectiveness. In the intelligence profession, that is called politicization.

If the elite media had accurately reported that the liberal staff refused to learn from any of the people involved the public's impression would have been very different.

The Republicans on the Intelligence Committee gave the elite media an opportunity to provide accurate and thorough reporting on this partisan travesty. Led by Ranking Member Saxby Chambliss of Georgia (an old and dear friend) the Republicans issued a dissenting report. This is 106 pages of devastating and factual rebuttal of both the process and the conclusions of the liberal Democratic report.

Trying to understand why the liberal Democrats would be so destructive and so willing to weaken America, risk American lives, help America's enemies and frighten America's allies, I was reminded of the brilliant speech given by Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican Convention.

Ambassador Kirkpatrick was a lifelong Democrat. She had been driven to support President Reagan by the increasingly radical, destructive and dangerous foreign and national security policies. Her speech is worth reading in full but for now a few excerpts drive home the point.

Kirkpatrick describes the "San Francisco Democrats" because that is where their convention was. Ironically the chair of the committee that issued this destructive report is Senator Feinstein from San Francisco. So the term fits.

Kirkpatrick asserted left wing Democrats were neither hawks nor doves; they were "like an ostrich--convinced it would shut out the world by hiding its head in the sand."

Kirkpatrick warned, in a phrase which applies today as much as it ever has, that "foreign policy is central to the security, to the freedom, to the prosperity, even to the survival of the United States." She outlined a series of threats and warned, "these are questions the San Francisco Democrats have not answered. These are questions they haven't even asked."

In a phrase which could apply directly to the anti-American tone of both the news media and the Democrats' report, Kirkpatrick insisted that "they always blame America first....the 'blame America first crowd' didn't blame the terrorists who murdered the Marines, they blamed the United States." This partisan attack document is simply another product of the blame-America-first ostriches who dominate the Democratic Party.

Inexcusably, the elite news media piled on with false repeating and gleefully blamed the Americans who risk their lives protecting the first amendment the media is supposed to cherish. 

When your friends ask you about this report, remind them there is no Senate report. There is a dishonest Democrat staff report given too much credence by the media.

It is a sad week for America and for those who risk their lives defending our nation.