Covering Up CIA Torture
July 25, 2006
Make the leak the story. This is always the tactic people who want wrongdoing to go unpunished take.
When memos proved that Senate Democrats were deliberately delaying judicial confirmation proceedings in an effort to manipulate the outcome of the pending cases, they made the leak of the memos the story. "Err, it doesn't matter if what the memos said are true. What matters is that someone leaked the memos!" Memogate. Sadly, the strategy worked.
If you'd think that conservatives, burned in Memogate, would have risen above this, you'd be very wrong. Just look at this post from Mike Rappaport:
We live in a pretty strange world. There are leaks of national security information, such as the existence of secret prisons in foreign countries, from the CIA and other places. While some people are hostile to the administration, it is clear that, whether you agree with the Administrator or not, this type of information needs to be kept secret to protect agreements with other governments or for other reasons. Yet, the Administration has been unable to stop the leaks.
Putting aside Rappaport's spin (they aren't secret prisons, they're gulags, stupid), I'm curious what what is worse: That the CIA is kidnapping American citizens to be tortured, or that someone exposed the illegal acts?
Mike Rappaport, who doesn't seem bothered by the gulags, must have missed this important lesson of childhood: Don't tattle when your sibling misses curfew by fifteen minutes, but do tell your parents about the crack pipe that fell out of her pocket!
Only someone morally blinded by political hackery could consider exposing gulags to be worse than the existence of the gulags. What a shame.