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"Obama has said that when it comes to the issue of torture during the Bush years, he prefers to “turn the page.” He’s pointed out that his Administration has banned “enhanced interrogation techniques” by executive order, but another Administration can just as easily re-authorize them. Without access to this meticulous, tragic, and available history, what’s to stop the country from repeating it? Before turning the page, the President might do well to make sure he, and the rest of us, can read it."
— Jane Mayer on why the Obama Administration should push for the public release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s still-classfied blockbuster report on C.I.A. wrongdoing during the Bush years: http://nyr.kr/12satrW(Source: newyorker.com)
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"Between the wrong man and real guilt there is the realm of people we talk ourselves into thinking could be useful to us… We may find that we are mistaken not only about the identity of some blindfolded men but also about who we are, and what we value."
— Amy Davidson on Khaled El-Masri, who was tortured after being wrongly identified as a member of Al Qaeda: http://nyr.kr/Z3HoBx -
The Petraeus Illusion
Petraeus’s downfall is only as great as we choose to make it. He was an exceptional military officer, and he helped steer a turnaround in what had been a hopeless, bloody mess of a war in Iraq. But his lionization by admiring and opportunistic politicians and fawning journalists and biographers—such as Paula Broadwell, the woman he was involved with—has been craven and boundless: Petraeus as America’s Prometheus. This derived in part from our habit of turning flesh-and-blood men into Paul Bunyans, but it was also the product of a gigantic official spin campaign in which the Bush Administration sought, through Petraeus, to retell the U.S. war in Iraq as a success story…
Jon Lee Anderson on the rise and fall of the Petraeus Illusion.
Photograph by Luke Sharrett/The New York Times/Redux.
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"I really resent you using the word 'torture'": Q & A with Jose Rodriguez→
Jose Rodriguez spent more than thirty years with the Central Intelligence Agency, eventually serving as the director of its Counterterrorism Center. He was involved in the Agency’s detention-and-interrogation program, which included holding prisoners in black sites and waterboarding them. Rodriguez wrote a book about his career, “Hard Measures: How Aggressive C.I.A. Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives,” which I’ve written about and discussed in a Q. & A. with Ali Soufan, a former F.B.I. agent (and the subject of a Profile by Lawrence Wright). Rodriguez and I discussed his book and the choices he and the C.I.A. made in e-mail and phone exchanges
Click-through to read Amy Davidson’s conversations with Jose Rodriguez: http://nyr.kr/LZbBfd
