Do you wonder why the Democrats -- and only the Democrats -- on the Senate Intelligence Committee felt compelled last week to release a report that slammed the CIA for its prisoner rendition program? It not only slammed the CIA it damned it, smeared it and besmirched it.
The most damning thing about the report, as far as I'm concerned, is what was not in the report. The Democrats did not interview a single person of prominence or authority that had anything to do with special and harsh treatment of prisoners. However, they found time to interview lawyers who represented GITMO detainees. You don't suppose any of them would distort the unvarnished truth -- do you?
For insight and enlightenment about what the CIA really did, I recommend reading a well written editorial in the Wall Street Journal by the three former CIA directors (Tenet, Goss and Hayden). The facts they lay out are far different from the accusations made by the Senate Democrats. Whom to believe? Well, for me, I believe the spooks (Tenet, et al.) even though I know full well they have reason to slant the story in their favor. By believing them, I am willing to let bygones be bygones, while recognizing that we have not been attacked again on our soil since those dark days in September 2001. Because of the CIA I feel our homeland is a much safer place today. I also believe that through its efforts we gained valuable intelligence to further protect this country. Since the earliest days of the Obama Administration our capacity to extract intelligence has been diminished.
President Obama has taken another path. He has conducted more than 400 drone strikes that have killed several thousand people in Pakistan and Yemen, rather than capture and interrogate terrorist leaders. I sometimes ask myself, which is more perverse and wicked: Killing people, some of whom are wives, children or grandparents of terrorists, and then refer to them as "collateral damage," or is it more vicious to punish people with the CIA's methods. Take people who have killed or sworn to kill Americans and strip them naked, deprive them of sleep, subject them to loud music and question them incessantly for hours on end. These are some of the tactics that former CIA agents readily admit have been used to break terrorists and according to these former agents these strategies have been highly successful.
Hypocrisy and nonsense continues
This is a postscript to last week's column where I outlined facts surrounding the shooting of a black teen by a white police officer and the nationwide rioting and looting that followed. I'm writing this from Denver, and here in the Mile-High City I'm sad to report the grand-standing hypocrisy from black leadership continues. The mayor, who is black, has given comfort and support to teenage law breakers who have skipped school much of this week and taken to the streets disrupting rush hour traffic on some days and marching to Downtown Denver on others, in what they've been led to believe as being in solidarity with the unruly mobs in Ferguson, Mo., New York City and other cities that are out of control.
The mayor told them, "How proud I am of the way you stepped out to have your voices heard." It's too bad the kids are being so misled. If he really cared about them he could have recited some true statistics about what's really going on in black communities in this country. Here are just a few:
• Young black men are much more likely to be shot by another black person than by a cop.
• FBI files disclose that there were nearly 6,300 black homicides last year and 85 percent involved other blacks.
• Only 3 percent of black deaths were from police shootings and in most of those cases they had resisted arrest or assaulted an officer.
He could have made it clear that cops are not gunning down black people willy-nilly and told them to go back to school.
I opine, you decide.
-- Willie Williams is a Siloam Springs resident. He can be reached at [email protected]. The opinions expressed are those of the author.
Editorial on 12/17/2014