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Mark Udall Can Make History by Releasing the Torture Report - Amy Goodman/TruthDig
Mark Udall Can Make History by Releasing the Torture ReportBy Amy Goodman - TruthDig
Posted on Dec 24, 2014
<snip>
Mark Udall, the outgoing Democratic senator from Colorado, may be a lame duck, leaving office in less than a week. But his most important work in the Senate may still be before him. For the week he remains in office, he still sits on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He worked on that committee’s epic, 6,700-page, still-secret report, the “Committee Study of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program,” otherwise known as the torture report. The intelligence committee has recently released a heavily redacted declassified executive summary of the report, in which new, gory details of the torture conducted during the Bush/Cheney administration have been made public for the first time.
Udall is angry about the U.S. torture program. He is angry about the heavy redaction of the executive summary, and the CIA and White House interference in the intelligence committee’s oversight work. He wants the full report made available to the public. While it is still secret, Udall could release the classified document in its entirety. To understand how, it helps to go back to 1971, the release of the Pentagon Papers and a senator from Alaska named Mike Gravel.
The Pentagon Papers were a secret history of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, written on the orders of then-Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. Daniel Ellsberg, one of the analysts who worked on the project, leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times. Ellsberg told me, “There were 7,000 pages of top-secret documents that demonstrated unconstitutional behavior by a succession of presidents, the violation of their oath and the violation of the oath of every one of their subordinates [including me] who had participated in that terrible, indecent fraud over the years in Vietnam, lying us into a hopeless war.”
The New York Times published its first Pentagon Papers story on June 13, 1971. A federal court then ordered The New York Times to cease publication, so Ellsberg sought a sympathetic U.S. senator who could enter the Pentagon Papers into the Congressional Record. This would also make all the papers available to the public in their raw form, not just the excerpts selected by the Times and other papers. Ellsberg found Mike Gravel.
Gravel was opposed to the war in Vietnam. He had filibustered on the floor of the Senate to block the draft. Ellsberg had given a copy of the papers to Ben Bagdikian, an editor at The Washington Post, on the condition that he give a copy to Sen. Gravel. Bagdikian met Gravel at midnight and transferred the papers from the trunk of one car to another outside The Mayflower Hotel. In order to enter these classified documents into the Congressional Record, Gravel found a loophole, which he recalled to me recently on the “Democracy Now!” news hour:
“Since I was the chairman of the Subcommittee on Buildings and Grounds, I could convene that subcommittee based upon the precedence of the House Un-American Activities Committee calling meetings on the fly as they went around the country to entrap people to testify. We called a meeting. ... By this time, it was 11:00-ish [p.m.]. And we were able to get a congressman from New York, [John G.] Dow, who came forward and testified. He wanted a federal building in his district. And I said that, ‘Well, I can appreciate that, and I’d be happy to authorize building a federal building in your district, but we don’t have the money. And the reason why we don’t have the money is because we’re squandering it in Southeast Asia, and let me read something about how we got into that mess.’ And so I proceeded to read the Pentagon Papers.”
Exhausted, emotional and unsure of the legal consequences of his actions, Gravel began reading into the record the horrors of the Vietnam War contained in the Pentagon Papers, then broke down in tears...
<snip>
Link: http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/mark_udall_can_make_history_by_releasing_the_torture_report_20141224
12 replies
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Release the FULL Report... Release ALL of the photos...
We paid for them.
