"Torture was just another bureaucracy."

TV, movie, Jack Bauer and James Bond fictions to the contrary, intelligence agencies are staffed by the same kinds of bureaucrats that make up the rest of the governmental bodies that inhabit Washington D.C.  Government Ineptitude, CIA-Style - Reason.com: "Faced with the conflicting claims about the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation" methods on suspected terrorists, most of us have neither the time nor the expertise to sift through all the evidence to make a definitive judgment. But here's a useful exercise: Imagine that in the aftermath of 9/11, the person in charge of the CIA was Kathleen Sebelius. Why would we expect the spy agency to do a more honest or effective job in getting information from detainees than HHS did in handling health insurance customers? The assumption among the Bush administration's defenders is that our intelligence community is made up of star performers with peerless skills and impeccable judgment. But it's not clear the CIA workforce is appreciably different from the rest of the Washington bureaucracy. The Senate Intelligence Committee report indicates it isn't. It says the agency couldn't keep track of how many detainees it had in custody and then lied to cover its failure. Some 26 captives were wrongfully held...

It quoted one senior official who complained that "managers seem to be selecting either problem, underperforming officers, new, totally inexperienced officers, or whomever seems to be willing and able to deploy at any given time." The result, the official said, was "useless intelligence." No one should be slack-jawed to learn that the people in charge didn't bother to assess whether they were doing a good job in protecting the nation from terrorism. They took that on faith. They placed complete confidence in their own motives and skill. "The CIA never conducted a credible, comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques," said the committee. "There are no CIA records to indicate that any of the reviews independently validated the 'effectiveness' claims presented by the CIA, to include the basic confirmation that the intelligence cited by the CIA was acquired from CIA detainees during or after the use of the CIA's enhanced interrogation techniques." Conflicting evidence was ignored. It was easier for agency leaders to believe their own propaganda and squelch dissent in the ranks. "The CIA marginalized and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms and objections," concluded the senators...

All of this is in keeping with a long list of government failures. The people who presided over the torture program were the same people who invaded Iraq expecting to be showered with daffodils. They were also the same people who oversaw the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. On that matter, a Republican-dominated special House committee was scathing in its judgment.

...The 9/11 attack, by contrast, was not anticipated, and the CIA was not prepared to gather intelligence from thousands of captured foreigners believed to be fighting on behalf of al-Qaida or the Taliban. The United States had signed an international treaty renouncing the use of torture. So the agency found itself rapidly putting into practice methods with which it had no experience or expertise, on disputable legal grounds. In responding to the 9/11 attack, it botched its responsibility, abused its powers, concealed its failures and exaggerated its achievements. Wow. Who could have seen that coming?"

How Torture Became Just Another Government Bureaucracy - Reason.com: "Strip out the torture and terrorism and you've got any other troubled government program. Was the Department of Health and Human Services honest with those charged with oversight about the state of Obamacare health insurance exchanges prior to their launch, and has it succeeded in providing affordable health insurance? It's the same argument. Torture was just another bureaucracy. As such, hundreds of eye-watering pages of the report are not about shoving hummus up a guy's ass, but rather who knew what, when, and whether various Department of Justice officials or inspectors general were in the loop about certain details, and so much paperwork. Like every bureaucratic battle, it's about making sure nobody can be directly held accountable even when mistakes are admitted to in the most passive of language. Procedures were followed, and when procedures weren't followed they were corrected eventually (maybe)."

...A bureaucracy always protects its own existence above any and all things. The nature of the CIA's acknowledgements of deficiencies are about fixing the bureaucracy and actually expanding it. More oversight! More guidelines! This program needs to exist, but we just need to be better at it! It's the bureaucracy-lover's equivalent of saying "My problem is that I just care too much." We see similar arguments about the problems with the implementation of Obamacare and with the IRS targeting conservative nonprofits. Never mind that in many cases, according to the Senate report, interrogators in the field were telling CIA leadership that these tortured detainees didn't have the information they were looking for. CIA officials insisted that they did. But instead of pushing out an incomplete, broken web site to sell health insurance because of pressure from above, they strung men up naked in stress positions and refused to let them sleep. The CIA must argue that the program worked, or else they might have to consider that the program shouldn't have happened and they shouldn't have been granted these additional powers."

If only we had some system in place where we could try to find out if all the people we had in custody were actually guilty of something before we tortured them.  We could call it a "try-all" for short.  The 'Graywashing' of CIA Torture - The Atlantic: ""Of the 119 known detainees," the Senate intelligence committee report declares, "at least 26 were wrongfully held and did not meet the detention standard in the September 2001 Memorandum of Notification." They "remained in custody for months after the CIA determined that they did not meet the standard," and one of these improperly detained prisoners, Abu Hudhaifa, "endured 66 hours of standing sleep deprivation and ice water baths," ABC News notes, "before being released because the CIA discovered he was likely not the person he was believed to be." In other words, even if you're someone who is inclined to give the CIA a break for torturing al-Qaeda members, there is no reason to give them a moral or legal pass for that most serious of all negligent acts save homicide: carelessly torturing an innocent.

...According to the Senate report, "untrained CIA officers ... conducted frequent, unauthorized, and unsupervised interrogations of detainees using harsh physical interrogation techniques that were not—and never became—part of the CIA's formal 'enhanced' interrogation program." So even if you're inclined to give a pass to CIA agents who were "just following orders" and legal guidelines handed down by the Office of Legal Counsel, why would you absolve from legal accountability the people responsible for sending untrained CIA officers to torture prisoners in ways that weren't even approved by torture-friendly lawyers? The most defensible instances of U.S. torture aren't, I don't think, actually defensible—but they certainly don't justify the least defensible torture sessions. The bundling of all torture into "the interrogation program" is meant to obscure the fact that particular individuals perpetrated lots of discrete, illegal, indefensible acts."