Mornin JMac. :2wave: Here is Peter baker of the NY Times and what the pushback is with Feinstein.
What’s the pushback from Senator Feinstein’s people on this?
PB: Well, I mean, their argument would be that they’ve spent a lot of time on this, five years, really, and that this is the most comprehensive look at this that we’ve seen publicly, yet. You’re right. They didn’t interview everybody. They were, they say they were constrained, to some extent, because while they were doing a lot of the research, it happened to coincide with the Department of Justice inquiry, and they didn’t want to get in the way of a criminal inquiry. But you know, what it does is it leaves some unanswered questions. I find myself most interested in sort of what it tells about the White House, right? And it’s interesting, because they have a lot of these CIA documents about what CIA did or did not tell the White House. But that’s sort of the edge of the waters for them, because they don’t then take us inside the White House and say okay, if the President wasn’t briefed by the CIA on these interrogation techniques, one of the things they said, what was happening inside the White House? Did Condi Rice brief him? Did Steve Hadley brief him? What did he know about it? What did he not know about it? And because they didn’t interview those people, we don’t really have answer to some of those questions.
PB: Well, the Senate Committee, the Democratic majority does. They’ve done a case study of these 20 instances that have been most cited as examples of where the program provided intelligence that helped to thwart attacks or otherwise meaningfully improve our understanding of al Qaeda. And they argue that in some of these cases, they already had the information from other sources, or in other cases, the information wasn’t as critical as has been made out to be. And it’s been exaggerated or overstated. Part of the problem, of course, is you’re talking about counterfactuals, right? If they didn’t do this, what would have happened? And it’s sort of like if not this, then that, right? They did get some information. Could they have gotten it a different way? How do we know for sure people were drawing lines and coming to conclusions? But you know, in part, that’s going to be a matter of interpretation.....snip~