The Senate Intelligence Committee released a newly declassified account of the opinions issued by the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel concerning CIA’s interrogation and detention program during the Bush Administration. The document is neutral, dispassionate, and maybe a little dull, particularly when compared with the gruesomely detailed contents of some of the OLC opinions themselves, on which it does not render any moral or legal judgment. Remarkably, release of this Senate report was blocked last year when the Bush Administration National Security Council refused to declassify it. But now it, and much more, has been released. See “Declassified Narrative Describing the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel’s Opinions on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program” (pdf), released April 22, 2009.
Another newly declassified report, from the Senate Armed Services Committee, does not shrink from drawing conclusions. “The report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration’s interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse–such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan–to low ranking soldiers. Claims, such as that made by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a ‘few bad apples,’ were simply false,” said Sen. Carl Levin in an April 21 floor statement introducing the report (large pdf).
Does torture work? Preempting and perhaps foreclosing an argument advanced by former Vice President Cheney and others, DNI Dennis C. Blair said in an April 21 statement that “The information gained from these techniques was valuable in some instances, but there is no way of knowing whether the same information could have been obtained through other means. The bottom line is these techniques have hurt our image around the world, the damage they have done to our interests far outweighed whatever benefit they gave us and they are not essential to our national security,” he said.
As the United States continues nuclear modernization on all legs of its nuclear triad through the creation of new variants of warheads, missiles, and delivery platforms, examining the effects of nuclear weapons production on the public is ever more pressing.
“The first rule of government transformation is: there are a lot of rules. And there should be-ish. But we don’t need to wait for permission to rewrite them. Let’s go fix and build some things and show how it’s done.”
To better understand what might drive the way we live, learn, and work in 2050, we’re asking the community to share their expertise and thoughts about how key factors like research and development infrastructure and automation will shape the trajectory of the ecosystem.
Recognizing the power of the national transportation infrastructure expert community and its distributed expertise, ARPA-I took a different route that would instead bring the full collective brainpower to bear around appropriately ambitious ideas.