Shooting the torture messenger

One of the fascinating aspects over the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA's torture regime has been the messaging from the opposition — the GOP and fellow travelers — along these lines:

This is all just politics. The Dems were voted out so this is just their way of getting back at the Republicans and the Bush Administration. This was all known by everyone before, so they are just dredging up the past in order to smear their opponents.

The fascinating thing about this line of argument is that it says nothing about the content and substance of the charges laid out by the Senate report. It's instead all about tone, and motivation, and other ad hominem ways of diverting the conversation from a debate about torture to a debate about politics.

Was the timing driven by political considerations? Of course it was. The Dems will be the minority in the Senate as of the new year, and the Senator who will be the GOP head of the Intelligence committee is very clearly not at all in favor of this info being released (http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2014/12/09/5374087/sen-richard-burr-says-he-will.html), nor will he hold any hearings into the matter ("Put this report down as a footnote in history"). So if it were ever to be released, it has to be now.

But even if release of the report was in fact motivated solely out of a desire to smear the Bush Administration and embarrass the nation — so what? What about what the report actually says? The idea that the American public and the world already knew about all of this is not only disingenuous (if that were true, then why get upset about the report being released) but clearly untrue (given the reactions actually happening). It also clashes with the idea that this will somehow cause some sort of new violence against the US.

If the information presented is false, it seems like it would be pretty easy to refute it. Were the practices described actually used? Straightforward to determine it. Were any significantly actionable piece of intel gathered? Certainly given we're talking over a decade of activity we can get at least one or two such "successes" clearly documented. Are allegations that the CIA lied to congressional and administration overseers about what they were doing false? If so, there should be some sort of paper trail to prove otherwise.

Let's talk about those things, regardless of the motivation and timing of the report's release (after how many months of debate about it).

Is torture a useful and proper way of dealing with people, be they avowed enemies of the United States or just grunts picked up on the battlefield? Isn't that a national discussion worth having?

Isn't all that more important than mudslinging about why the report was released now?

Fischer: Release Of Torture Report Shows That Democrats Are ‘Juvenile Delinquents’
The AFA’s Bryan Fischer was predictably outraged by the release of the Senate report on the CIA’s use of torture … not by the torture itself, mind you, but rather by the release of the repor

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