Richard Nixon resigned 40 years ago today.
My mom, my brothers, and I were watching the TV, and old black and white Admiral, when he announced his resignation.
We cheered profusely.
Author: Matthew G. Saroff
More Musical Computer Antiques
In this case, a dot matrix printer playing “Eye of the Tiger” by Survivor:
H/t Neo on the Stellar Parthenon BBS.
And the Bombs Drop in Iraq
To quote Michael Corleone, “Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.”
We are now bombing targets in Iraq, any guess as to when we start seeing special forces, CIA paramilitaries, and mercenaries private military contractors end up involved in ground combat?
U.S. warplanes bombed Islamist fighters marching on Iraq’s Kurdish capital on Friday after President Barack Obama said Washington must act to prevent “genocide”.
Islamic State fighters, who have beheaded and crucified captives in their drive to eradicate unbelievers, have advanced to within a half hour’s drive of Arbil, capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region and a hub for U.S. oil companies.
They have also seized control of Iraq’s biggest dam, Kurdish authorities confirmed on Friday, which could allow them to flood cities and cut off vital water and electricity supplies.
The Pentagon said two F/A-18 aircraft from an aircraft carrier in the Gulf had dropped laser-guided 500-pound bombs on the fighters’ artillery and other airstrikes had targeted motar positions and an Islamic State convoy.
Obama authorised the first U.S. air strikes on Iraq since he pulled all troops out in 2011, arguing action was needed to halt the Islamist advance, protect Americans and safeguard hundreds of thousands of Christians and members of other religious minorities who have fled for their lives.
And Maliki remains Iraqi PM, and almost as much of a problem as ISIS, remains determined to stay in power:
Maliki, a Shi’ite Islamist accused by foes of fuelling the Sunni revolt by running an authoritarian sectarian state, has refused to step aside to break a stalemate since elections in April, defying pressure from Washington and Tehran.
Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a reclusive 84-year-old scholar whose word is law for millions of Shi’ites in Iraq and beyond, has repeatedly pushed for politicians to break the deadlock and reunify the country. His weekly sermon on Friday, read out by an aide, was his clearest call for Maliki to go.
Though he did not mention Maliki by name, he said those who cling to posts were making a “grave mistake”.
The fact that al-Sistani pretty much told Maliki to resign is telling.
He has studiously kept out of Iraqi politics, but even he has had enough of Nouri al-Maliki.
This is a Classic Case of Regulatory Capture
After the public outrage over the NYPD choking a man to death for allegedly selling single cigarettes, the Civilian Complaint Review Board wants to have fewer investigations:
With New York in an uproar over the death of Eric Garner after police put him in a chokehold, the new chairman of the group that handles public grievances about the NYPD floated the idea yesterday that his agency should stop listening to people who complain about police stops.
“I’m not sure stop-and-frisk is still appropriate for this agency,” Richard Emery, the head of the Civilian Complaint Review Board said at his first board meeting. “So many other people are working on it.”
NYCLU Associate Legal Director Chris Dunn—who last month accused the board, then in its sixth month without a chairman, of being “on life support”—strongly disagreed.
“There’s no way this agency can walk away from stop-and-frisk,” Dunn said. “There are more interactions around stop-and-frisk than any other interaction in the police department….I’m just telling you: When you as the incoming chair of the CCRB say something like ‘We should get out of the business of stop-and-frisk,’ that is sending the wrong signal.
This isn’t the first time the CCRB has appeared to try to back away from stop-and-frisk issues. In May, Dunn confronted board members about a leaked memo that seemed to suggest that frisks conducted when cops issue a summons can’t be subject to review by the board.
Any civilian police review board must have not just an adversarial role with the police department, but it must have an adversarial mindset, because no organization can be trusted to police itself.
If the Police do not hate a civilian review board, then that civilian review board is simply not doing its job.
The sentiments expressed by Richard Emery are literally those of a petty bureaucrat in a police state.
Deep Thought
I know that today is officially World Cat Day, but isn’t every day World Cat Day?
If not, my cats will be very cross.
I Did Not Know that You Could Make a Ham From Bear!
My older (and hairier) brother, AKA Bear Who Swims, is the umbrella bearer in this production of the Gilbert and Sullivan Operetta, The Mikado.
You will notice that he is not singing. This is because none of the Saroff boys got their mom’s singing voice, they got their dad’s singing(?!?!?) voice.
Nerdgasm!!!!!!!
Kewl!!!
I just came across a Kickstarter for a new Star Trek movie:
Axanar is the independent Star Trek film which proves that a feature-quality Star Trek film can be made on a small budget.
(PLEASE NOTE: Kickstarter will not charge your pledge till the end of the campaign on August 31. So you have that much time to save up!)
Our 20-minute short film, Prelude to Axanar, premiered Saturday, July 26th, 2014, at San Diego Comic Con and features Richard Hatch, Tony Todd, Kate Vernon, JG Hertzler and Gary Graham, who reprises his role of Soval from “Enterprise”. The makeup was done by Academy Award winner Kevin Haney and Star Trek veteran Brad Look and Make Up Effects Lab. Top that off with the amazing visual effects of Tobias Richter and The Light Works, and sound by Academy Award winner Frank Serafine, and the result is Prelude to Axanar: something unlike anything you have ever seen before. We have our loyal donors to thank for this!This Kickstarter is for the full-length feature Axanar. Unlike the short film, which we shot in two days and cost $75,000, the 90-minute Axanar feature will take about 20 days and cost about $650,000. So we are breaking up our costs into discreet sections which should allow us to reach significant milestones, as we don’t expect to raise all $650,000 at once. This first Kickstarter will be for the sound stage and set construction. Anything over what we need for that will be applied to the feature production costs. Full details are below.
It should be noted that they have already raised $207,447 of their goal of $100,000 with 16 days to go, so I do not think that their funding goal is unrealistic, though I cannot see how they can do a whole feature length film for $650K.
The CGI might not be that much, what with the realitiess of Moore’s law, but I cannot see how they could do this on such a low budget.
I do not think I could even to decent set design for their whole budget.
Still, enjoy this nerd pr0n.
Not My Choice, but It’s a Start
This post was corrected on 26 January, 2016.
Dr. Dirk Markus has no connection to Aurelius Capital Management LP, the vulture fund in question.
He is the CEO of Aurelius Equity Opportunities, which is a completely unrelated financial firm, and is not involved with the attempted looting of Argentina in any way.
My apologies.
Argentina is going to the International Court of Justic in the Hague:
Argentina has asked the international court of justice (ICJ) in The Hague to take action against the United States over an alleged breach of its sovereignty as it defaulted on its debt.
Argentina defaulted last week after losing a long legal battle with hedge funds that rejected the terms of debt restructurings in 2005 and 2010.
A statement issued by the ICJ, the United Nation’s highest court for disputes between nations, said Argentina’s request had been sent to the US government. It added that no action will be taken in the proceedings “unless and until” Washington accepts the court’s jurisdiction.
The US has recognised the court’s jurisdiction in the past, but it was not immediately clear if it would do so in Argentina’s case.
I guess that this is one avenue to take, though I think that the Argentinean investigation into possible violation of their laws by the vulture funds would likely be a better course of action:
Argentina’s markets watchdog on Monday launched an investigation into what it believes may have been unlawful speculation by holdout creditors whose litigation against the country for repayment of their defaulted bonds pushed it into a new default last week.
………
The head of Argentina’s Securities Commission Alejandro Vanoli said it had asked its U.S. counterpart for information on trade of Argentina’s sovereign debt and credit default swaps (CDS), derivatives used to insure against default.
The watchdog wanted to check if holdouts who rejected Argentina’s restructuring in the wake of its 2002 default held or traded CDS while they took part in negotiations with Argentina which could trigger a default.
“The use of insider information, which would be the case here, and market manipulation are crimes in Argentina, they are crimes in the United States, and they imply economic sanctions and eventually criminal sanctions,” Vanoli told a news conference.
While they might prevail at the ICJ, it is by no means a certainty, and it is also an open question as to whether or not the US government will obey that foreign court.
On the other hand, a prosecutor can indict a ham sandwich, and once they have file for extradition of the vulture funds senior staff.
Additionally, they could put a bounty on their heads, and if they were to promise a few million dollars for the apprehension and rendering of these people back to Argentina, you could be guaranteed that the pucker factor would skyrocket.
Additionally, it would be legal under US law, which grants extraordinary powers to bounty hunters.
If Argentina can win this, we deter from vulture fund f%$#ery, particularly if Mark Brodsky is delivered to Buenos Aires in chains with hoods over their heads.
And We are Back in the Iraq War
I just heard the Obama press conference, and while I expected him to make an announcement about air dropping aid to the Yazidis who have been driven to the slopes of Mount Sinjar by ISUIS, he also put the camels under then tent and threatened, “limited air strikes,” and he dropped the “G-word” with regard to the behavior of ISIS/ISIL/IS/whatever they called today. (Genocide)
We were back in Iraq, and the distinction between Bush and Obama become even more blurred.
Of course, if we really want to preempt ISIS’ ability to make war, we need to disrupt their war making ability at the source, and bomb Riyadh.
It Took You Long Enough!
The New York Times has finally agreed to stop using euphemisms, and actually call the CIA’s torture program, well, torture :
Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture.
When the first revelations emerged a decade ago, the situation was murky. The details about what the Central Intelligence Agency did in its interrogation rooms were vague. The word “torture” had a specialized legal meaning as well as a plain-English one. While the methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of “torture.” The Times described what we knew of the program but avoided a label that was still in dispute, instead using terms like harsh or brutal interrogation methods.
………
Meanwhile, the Justice Department, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has made clear that it will not prosecute in connection with the interrogation program. The result is that today, the debate is focused less on whether the methods violated a statute or treaty provision and more on whether they worked – that is, whether they generated useful information that the government could not otherwise have obtained from prisoners. In that context, the disputed legal meaning of the word “torture” is secondary to the common meaning: the intentional infliction of pain to make someone talk.
Given those changes, reporters urged that The Times recalibrate its language. I agreed. So from now on, The Times will use the word “torture” to describe incidents in which we know for sure that interrogators inflicted pain on a prisoner in an effort to get information.
About f%$#ing time.
The Times has had absolutely no problem with calling other nations’ various brutalities, “torture,” but it’s taken 10 years, and a flat out admission from the President, for the New York Times to finally dip its toes in this water as it applies to the US state security apparatus.
It’s why I tend to look overseas, typically the Beeb and the Guardian, for accurate stories on these matters.
So, How is that Whole Efficiency of the Whole Profit Driven Market Based Thing Working In Healthcare?
It turns out as more and more for-profit hospices are entering the market, more and more of hospice patients are leaving those hospices under their own power, largely because the for-profit hospices are taking non-terminal patients, and driving out expensive terminal ones, in order to maximize their bottom line:
At hundreds of U.S. hospices, more than one in three patients are dropping the service before dying, new research shows, a sign of trouble in an industry supposed to care for patients until death.
When that many patients are leaving a hospice alive, experts said, the agencies are likely to be either driving them away with inadequate care or enrolling patients who aren’t really dying in order to pad their profits.
It is normal for a hospice to release a small portion of patients before death — about 15 percent has been typical, often because a patient’s health unexpectedly improves.
But researchers found that at some hospices, and particularly at new, for-profit companies, the rate of patients leaving hospice care alive is double that level or more.
The number of “hospice survivors” was especially high in two states: in Mississippi, where 41 percent of hospice patients were discharged alive, and Alabama, where 35 percent were.
“When you have a live discharge rate that is as high as 30 percent, you have to wonder whether a hospice program is living up to the vision and morality of the founders of hospice,” said Joan Teno, a Brown University hospice doctor and researcher and the lead author of the article published in the Journal of Palliative Medicine. “One part of the reason is some of the new hospice providers may not have the same values — they may be more concerned with profit margins than compassionate care.”
(emphasis mine)
When people call for “Market Based Solutions,” this is what you get.
Grifting from the Rick Scotts* of the world.
*While head of Columbia/HCA, the current governor of governor’s company engaged in activities leading to their having to pay nearly a billion dollars to the government for Medicare fraud.
Well, Waddya Know? Facebook has a Redeeming Social Function
It turns out that it’s a giving an opportunity for ignorant bigots to out themselves:
There are plenty of reasons to loathe Facebook. There’s the new messenger app that they’re making users install if they want to chat on their mobile devices. There’s the way they screwed around with users’ feeds, just as a little experiment. There’s the overall way it makes people unhappy. If you see it as a community, it’s pretty terrible. But if you instead choose to view it as the world’s most effective bozo-disclosing app, it’s rather brilliant.
Your mouth to God’s ear, Mary Elizabeth Williams.
On Wednesday alone, two outspoken Facebook users found themselves facing abrupt ends to their jobs after realizing too late that other people can actually see what you post in public. First, Virginia state Republican Party treasurer Bob FitzSimmonds resigned after controversy erupted when he declared on Facebook that Barack Obama’s recent comments on the achievements of Muslim Americans were “pure nonsense,” and asked, “Exactly what part of our nation’s fabric was woven by Muslims? What about Sikhs, Animists, and Jainists? Should we be thanking them too?” FitzSimmonds also drew ire earlier this year when he referred to Fairfax County Delegate Barbara Comstock as a “twat.” And in 2012, he raised eyebrows for speculating about when Obama “dies and goes to hell.” In a resignation letter he submitted to the State Central Committee this week, he said, “After discussion with several party leaders it seems clear that I will either need to stop posting on social media or step down from my party office.” While another, brighter individual might have chosen the former – to simply ease off on saying idiotic and offensive things in public — fortunately for FitzSimmonds’ colleagues, he chose the latter.
Also on Wednesday, a Texas police detective was fired after posting a Facebook tirade about the local “useless lazy turdbags” with “thousands of dollars of ink have adorning their unclean bodies” on government assistance. In his recent post, Detective Rob Douglas vowed, “I promise, if I ever snap and go on a killing spree, it will be in a supermarket on the first.” When announcing the decision to terminate Douglas, Marlin Police Chief Darrell Allen called the comments “inappropriate and troubling.” And yet, they did help take an resentful, angry cop off the streets, so they’ve got to be at least a little good for something.
In its relatively short lifespan, Facebook has proven itself the downfall of countless racists, sexists, homophobes and straight-up dopes. Turns out there’s always somebody willing to log on and do something regrettable. Earlier this summer, an Illinois woman was arrested for shoplifting – after posting selfies of her new merchandise on her page. And last month, after bragging on Facebook that “Y’all will never catch me,” Baltimore police did just that to Roger Ray Ireland after he violated his probation. And on Aug. 5, a Swedish politician abruptly ended his campaign shortly after referring on Facebook to “the Jewish pigs.” Reminder: This is all just in the past few weeks.
These days, Facebook is the “Maccaca Moment” Generator of choice.
dEEP tHOUGHT
H/t StevenMB at Daily Kos.
I Honestly Do Not Know if this is Cute or Terrifying
But a 2 m tall penguin weighing 115 kg could play outside linebacker in the NFL:
A penguin species that lived millions of years ago would have dwarfed today’s biggest living penguins and stood as tall as most humans, according to analysis of fossils by a team of researchers from the La Plata Museum in Argentina.
Palaeeudyptes klekowskii has already been dubbed the “colossus penguin”, and is the most complete fossil ever uncovered from the Antarctic. The unearthed bones are 37m years old and include the longest recorded fused ankle-foot bone as well as parts of a wing bone.
From those bones, researchers estimated the species would have stood 2m tall from toe to beak tip, and weighed as much as 115kg. Standing normally, beak down, the penguin would have be around 1.6m tall, the team reported in the journal Geobios.
By comparison, the tallest and heaviest living species, the emperor penguin (Aptenodytes forsteri), stands 1.1m high and weighs just under 50kg.
This is like Ted “The Mad Stork” Hendricks in a tuxedo.
Unreal.
There is No Light at the End of the Tunnel. We are Just Digging a Deeper Hole.
The usual suspects are arguing that killing of General Green in Afghanistan means that we should double down on the forever war going on there:
An insider attack against international and Afghan forces in Kabul that killed a U.S. general has renewed questions about the Obama administration’s exit strategy from Afghanistan and the country’s security.
………
Republican lawmakers critical of Obama’s withdrawal plan pointed to the insider attack as a reason to change course. In May, Obama announced plans to reduce U.S. troop strength to 9,800 by the end of this year and to half that number in late 2015. Only a small security assistance force at the U.S. embassy would remain by the end of 2016, as Obama prepares to leave office.
I’m beginning to think that we need a constitutional amendment requiring that all children of Congressmen between the ages of 18 and 40 be required to serve as active duty service members.
I expect to hear from John McCain arguing for moar woar on the Sunday shows in 4 days.
Remember When I Said that Newspapers Should Fact Check Their Own OP/EDs?*
Well, it’s finally happened, and the paper was to do it was the Kansas City Star, an unlikely journalistic innovator, but they fact checked the editorial they published from Stephen Moore, head economist at the frequently fact challenged Heritage Foundation, † and discover that he is lying through his teeth:
The Kansas City Star probably thought it was on solid ground when it published an op-ed by Stephen Moore defending the draconian, and economically debilitating, tax cuts instituted by Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback. (We reported on how the tax cuts have turned Kansas into a smoking ruin here.)
Moore’s conservative credentials are impeccable: A former member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, he’s currently chief economist at the Heritage Foundation and a familiar face on Fox News and CNBC. So when his piece asserted that “over the last five years,” the no-income-tax states of Texas and Florida gained jobs while the high-tax states of New York and California lost jobs, the editors waved it through.
Moore punctuated his statistical victory over Brownback’s critics with the ironic refrain “Oops.”
Oops, indeed.
It turns out Moore’s statistics were dead wrong. He later explained that he was citing figures from 2007-2012, not the last five years. But–oops again–he got those figures wrong too. His errors were discovered by Yael T. Abouhalkah, a Star columnist, who took the simple step of cross-checking them against the source, the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
In this age of the Google machine, it would be a trivial matter for a newspaper to assign a junior reporter to fact check every statistic in every editorial that they publish on their own (syndicated editorials are a more complex matter).
In fact, any decent Googler could fact check a couple of hours.
To quote the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “‘You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.”
An OP/ED should not be a license to lie.
*Here is one example from juxtaposition the former Kaplan Test Prep company and Sarah Palin.
†Full disclosure: I have a personal reason for hating the ratf%$#s at the Heritage Foundation. They fired a friend of mine for having cancer.
The New York Times Compares the CIA Torture Coverup to Catch-22
If you recall, the Times was forced to publish its story about NSA spying on Americans when their James Risen, who co-wrote this story announced that he was going to publish on its own.
The “Gray Lady” has a long history of kowtowing to the US state security apparatus, which is why we see an OP/ED by Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal invoking the seminal Joseph Heller war farce to describe the CIA’s behavior with regard the Senate Inteligence Committee’s torture report:
In Joseph Heller’s anti-war satire, “Catch 22,” the hero, Yossarian, is assigned to a censorship detail. He amuses himself by deleting all the adverbs and adjectives from soldiers’ letters, then all the articles, then everything but the articles, and so on. His job was to delete details that threatened operational security. The result was gibberish.
It seems the Central Intelligence Agency was inspired by Yossarian’s example.
The C.I.A. was given the task of censoring the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report denouncing none other than the C.I.A. for torturing prisoners, lying to its overseers in Congress about the torture, and exaggerating how much valuable information the torture provided (if any). The result was predictable and proof, if anyone still needed it, that having the subject of the report censor that report is a very bad idea.
When the White House approved the C.I.A.’s censorship (the term of art in Washington is “redaction”) and sent the report to the Hill, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, said in his usual sneering way that 85 percent of the report was intact and that half the blackouts were made to footnotes.
The issue, of course, is not merely how much is deleted, but what is deleted. On Monday, McClatchy reported that C.I.A. censors had blacked out the pseudonyms used to protect the identities of agents involved in the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. That, McClatchy said, rendered parts of the report unintelligible.
“Redactions are supposed to remove names or anything that could compromise sources and methods, not to undermine the source material so that it is impossible to understand,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, the New Mexico Democrat, who is a member of the intelligence committee. “Try reading a novel with 15 percent of the words blacked out.”
………
Asked about the dispute, the White House press secretary Josh Earnest, offered the usual boilerplate about national security reviews. Here’s how Yossarian might have quoted him: “It is BLANK that a BLANK process be carried out that BLANKS sources and BLANK and other BLANK that is BLANK to our BLANK BLANK.”
Let me be clear: this is not one of the unsigned Times editorials, and as such, it is not as official as that would be, but this is the f%$#ing editorial page editor of the f%$#ing New York Times, and as such, is arguably the 3rd most official statement from the paper. (something from publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. coming in at number 2).
As I have said before, Obama, and the rest of his national security troika, fetishize secrecy, and you can expect a good faith declassification from them, so the Senate Intelligence Committee should exercise its statutory authority, and declassify the report on its own.
Oh, My F%$#ing God! This is Not the Onion
Private prison company Corrections Corporation of America, looking to expand its business. intends to open an animal shelter:
Sorry, give me a second. BREATHE JANE. BREATHE…okay. Just a few more deep breaths.
Almost there.
So Corrections Corporation of America — the people who brought you immigrant abuse in their private Texas prisons — want to get into the animal shelter business. In Citrus County Florida.IT’S NOT ENOUGH that CCA is understaffing their people prisons to cut corners, resulting in higher levels of inmate violence and death. Which they then overbill for. And you can’t FOIA how many sexual assaults are happening there because as a private company they’re not responsive to FOIA requests.
They’ve been sued for insufficiently treating inmates who have health problems because that costs money, then they pay academics from Temple University to run “astonishingly misleading” studies that say they “save money” because they don’t take into account health care costs. Which they don’t want to pay.
They also hire people to work in prisons who have, you know, murdered people.
The most depressing thing is that we are likely to see more outrage over how CCA would treat dogs than how it would treat human beings.
Too True
Kevin Drum explains why members of Congress thinks that broadband service in the US is just hunky-dory:
If you are in Congress, you live in an apartment/condo/house in Virginia/The District/Maryland most of the year.
So, Their internet speed is just fine, thank you.
Feinstein* Accuses the CIA of Using Redactions to Muzzle Torture Report
This is what Dianne Feinstein means when she says that “certain redactions eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions.”
I would start getting my ducks in a row about having the Senate intelligence committee releasing the report unilaterally, because it is clear that neither the CIA, nor Barack Obama have the slightest interest interest in the public’s right to know here:
The key senator behind a landmark congressional investigation into the CIA’s use of torture has rejected redactions made by the Obama administration ahead of a planned public release of the politically charged report.
In the latest struggle between senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who chairs the intelligence committee, and the CIA, Feinstein said she would delay a heavily anticipated disclosure of portions of the report in an attempt to reverse redactions that “eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions”.
“Until these redactions are addressed to the committee’s satisfaction, the report will not be made public,” said Feinstein, who added that she intended to outline the committee’s desired disclosures in a private letter to President Barack Obama.
Another powerful senator and Obama ally, Carl Levin, the Michigan Democrat who chairs the armed services committee and who spearheaded his own investigation into US military torture, called the redactions “totally unacceptable.”
Spencer Ackerman’s analysis at this point becomes rather chilling:
Clapper left the door open to a “constructive dialogue with the committee.” In an indication of the deep strains between the committee and the CIA, that dialogue is largely brokered by the White House, which is attempting to balance the competing interests of both powerful entities while each looks to Obama for support.
So, apparently, the f%$#ing US state security apparatus is now a branch of government coequal to the Executive and the Congress, and, if the constant assertions of the State Secrets Privilege by the DoJ, the judiciary as well.
They aren’t, and the fact that the CIA is defying the Senate committee charged with overseeing their actions is wrong from almost every perspective.
*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.
Full statement from her office after the break:
Aug 05 2014
Feinstein Statement on Redactions in Detention, Interrogation Study
Washington—Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) today released the following statement on the committee study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program:
“After further review of the redacted version of the executive summary, I have concluded that certain redactions eliminate or obscure key facts that support the report’s findings and conclusions. Until these redactions are addressed to the committee’s satisfaction, the report will not be made public.“I am sending a letter today to the president laying out a series of changes to the redactions that we believe are necessary prior to public release. The White House and the intelligence community have committed to working through these changes in good faith. This process will take some time, and the report will not be released until I am satisfied that all redactions are appropriate.
“The bottom line is that the United States must never again make the mistakes documented in this report. I believe the best way to accomplish that is to make public our thorough documentary history of the CIA’s program. That is why I believe taking our time and getting it right is so important, and I will not rush this process.”
(Emphasis original)