What America should really learn from Dianne Feinstein
It seems like another age—almost a different America, shrouded in a different dark cloud—but it was just nine years ago, on a Friday: Dianne Feinstein, then the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, got a call from John Kerry, the secretary of state and an old friend. Ms Feinstein, a Democrat from California, had just dispatched to the printer the executive summary of her committee’s report on the CIA’s use of torture after the attacks of September 11th 2001. She was planning to release the findings the next week, despite intense resistance not just from the CIA but from Barack Obama’s White House, which had demanded so many redactions she had feared the report might be “decimated”.
Now Mr Kerry was making one more effort, admonishing her that revealing the report could provoke violence around the world. His warning was echoed over the weekend by American intelligence agencies, which issued a threat assessment that the committee’s disclosures would not only lead to violence but also significantly damage American relationships with other countries.
Imagine the weight of responsibility. Ms Feinstein, who died in office at the age of 90 on September 29th, was no enemy of the security state. She defended the government’s “targeted killings” via drone and its surveillance programmes; she regarded Edward Snowden, who revealed that the National Security Agency had vacuumed up Americans’ phone records, as a traitor. Now people and agencies she trusted were predicting she would have blood on her hands if she went ahead—and they would be able to say she had been warned. “That’s a lot to ask of an elected official,” says Daniel Jones, who was the committee’s chief investigator.
2023-10-05 07:47:55
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