Sheldon Richman on Getting Away With Torture

Now we have it straight from the chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Sen. Dianne Feinstein: "CIA detainees were tortured… the conditions of confinement and the use of authorized and unauthorized interrogation and conditioning techniques were cruel, inhuman, and degrading." She should have added "sadistic." Your tax money went to employ sadists. Perhaps this is nothing new. Feinstein writes this in introducing the recently declassified, but heavily redacted 525-pageexecutive summary of the committee's 6,000-page report on the CIA's post-9/11 use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" (EIT). It portrays a dishonest and brutal agency determined to use whatever methods it wished regardless of legality. No excuse, writes Sheldon Richman, is acceptable for torture.