It didn’t have to happen the way it did … but Nixon, who is a moderate [as vice president] to Eisenhower, ends up playing the Southern strategy; and then, of course, it runs through Reagan (who is very deliberately using it) and then into the present. But did that have to happen? No, I don’t think it did. It was a deliberate choice on the part of the Republican politicos to do that; and it’s a sin.
When you think about where the Republican Party situated itself regionally and ideologically at its founding, and where it places itself on the same axes today, the irony is so striking that it feels almost heavy-handed.
As Lincoln said when somebody was arguing with him once … it’s like two men who fight so hard they fight into one another’s coats. Yes, it to me looks very much like the Republicans and the Democrats have switched sides.
“The ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were far more brutal than anyone understood. Perhaps most importantly, these techniques did not work. Nonetheless, the program was sold to the White House, the Department of Justice, the Congress, and the media as a necessary program that provided unique information that ‘saved lives,” according to Udall.
Udall says even as late as last year the CIA was still not being straight with Congress. “As I discovered in late 2013, an internal CIA review of the program initiated under former Director Panetta corroborates some of the significant findings of the [Senate committee] Study and acknowledges significant errors made during the course of the CIA program—but this internal review conflicts with the CIA’s own official response provided to the Committee, which denies or minimizes those same errors.”
Udall reports that Committee staffers spotted those glaring contradictions between the internal Panetta review’s conclusions about the enhanced interrogation program, provided years earlier to them, and the official June 27, 2013, response submitted by the CIA to the Senate Committee.
“Committee staff grew concerned that the CIA was knowingly providing inaccurate information to the Committee in the present day—which would be a serious offense and a deeply troubling matter for the Committee, the Congress, the White House, and our country,” writes Udall. “To preserve evidence of this potential offense, Committee securely transported a printed portion of the draft Panetta review from the CIA-leased facility to the Committee’s secure offices in the Senate.”
In March of this year Udall wrote President Obama to complain of an “unprecedented action” taken by the CIA against the Senate Intelligence Committee which left unchallenged would undermine the Senate’s Constitutional obligation to exercise oversight and as a direct consequence “our democracy.”
A few days later the story broke about the CIA’s unauthorized hacking into the Intelligence Committee’s computers. Udall writes it was an illegal search “conducted out of concern that Committee staff already had access to the Panetta review, a document they were fully cleared to see. More troubling, despite admitting to the Committee that the CIA conducted the search, Director Brennan at the same time publicly referred to “spurious allegations about CIA actions that are wholly unsupported by the facts.”