Last week, David Cole, the Hon. George J. Mitchell Professor in Law and Public Policy at Georgetown University Law Center, the co-chairman of the Constitution Project’s Liberty and Security Committee, and theNation’s legal affairs correspondent, concluded that the CIA got a “bum rap” from the Senate intelligence committee’s report on torture and abuse. As a result, he wrote an exculpatory brief for the CIA in the New York Times. Cole believed he was justified in doing so because he had finally read the entire report and concluded that the CIA “was treated unfairly.”
Well, I’ve also read the report, and I am shocked by what Cole doesn’t deign to mention in his article. Nowhere does Cole mention that the torture and abuse was sadistic; that it began before the Department of Justice sanctioned certain measures; and that it incorporated measures that were never permitted by the so-called Torture Memoranda. It is noteworthy that even the leading co-author of the memoranda, John Yoo, another legal scholar, believes that those individuals who conducted sadistic measures could be indicted.
Nowhere does Cole mention some of the more bizarre and unconscionable aspects of CIA’s torture and abuse such as “rectal feeding” and “rectal hydration” that involved a “pureed” blend of hummus and raisins that was “rectally infused.”