The Torture Report: What is the GOP Really Afraid of?

Not that Congressional Republicans need much of anything for them to totally come out disagreeing with Barack Obama, but the controversy about the soon to be released executive summary of the Senate report on the use of torture by the United States government makes one wonder about the real motives of the GOP.  They claim that their concern is over that the report's release could endanger the U.S. diplomatic corps and set the stage for future Benghazi like attacks.  But is the real worry that the report will show the lawlessness of the Bush/Cheney regime and underscore that Bush, Cheney and a number of subordinates are war criminals that ought to stand trial  as Nazis did at Nuremberg?  The New York Times looks at the controversy.  Here are highlights (NOTE: for me, listening to Dick Cheney on this issue is like giving Hitler and Himmler input on whether Nazis should have stood trial - WTF is wrong with the media?):

On the eve of a long-awaited Senate report on the use of torture by the United States government — a detailed account that will shed an unsparing light on the Central Intelligence Agency’s darkest practices after the September 2001 terrorist attacks — the Obama administration and its Republican critics clashed on Monday over the wisdom of making it public, and the risk that it will set off a backlash overseas.

While the United States has put diplomatic facilities and military bases on alert for heightened security risks, administration officials said they do not expect the report — or rather the declassified executive summary of it that will be released Tuesday — to ignite the kind of violence that killed four Americans at a diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012. 

But some leading Republican lawmakers have warned against releasing the report, saying that domestic and foreign intelligence reports indicate that a detailed account of the brutal interrogation methods used by the C.I.A. during the George W. Bush administration could incite unrest and violence, even resulting in the deaths of Americans.

Former [and war criminal] Vice President Dick Cheney added his voice to those of other Bush administration officials defending the C.I.A., declaring in an interview Monday that its harsh interrogations a decade ago were “absolutely, totally justified,” and dismissing allegations that the agency withheld information from the White House or inflated the value of its methods.

“When would be a good time to release this report?” the White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, asked. “It’s difficult to imagine one, particularly given the painful details that will be included.”

But he added, “The president believes it is important for us to be as transparent as we possibly can about what exactly transpired, so we can just be clear to the American public and people around the world that something like this should not happen again.”

In addition to tightening security at embassies, the Pentagon will bolster the protection of its forces in Afghanistan, officials said. Intelligence agencies will ramp up their monitoring of the communications of terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State.

Among the administration’s concerns is that terrorist groups will exploit the disclosures in the report for propaganda value. The Islamic State already clads its American hostages in orange jumpsuits, like those worn by prisoners in C.I.A. interrogations. Hostages held by the Islamic State in Syria were subjected to waterboarding, one of the practices used by the C.I.A. to extract information from suspected terrorists.

The White House will also have to deal with diplomatic fallout from the report in countries that aided the United States in transporting prisoners or playing host to so-called black sites, where the interrogations occurred. One such country is Poland.

While the names of these countries are redacted in the declassified report, their identity is scarcely a mystery. Poland, for example, has been cited by a court for its involvement in the program, which has been highly controversial among both opponents inside Poland and international human rights activists for more than a decade.

The European Court of Human Rights ruled in July that Poland was complicit in the interrogation program and awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to two men: Abu Zubaydah, suspected of running a Qaeda facility in Pakistan, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, believed to have planned the attack on the U.S.S. Cole.

“Poland, for all practical purposes, facilitated the whole process, created the conditions for it to happen, and made no attempt to prevent it from occurring,” the court ruled. Polish officials have steadfastly denied the country was involved in the secret prison program.

No matter how ugly the truth may be, Americans need to know the horrors that were done in their name.  It's the only way to try to keep this from ever happening again - and to hopefully someday see those who authorized it held accountable.