When assesssing the BBC’s coverage of the Democratic Party’s hatchet job on the CIA consider this from Douglas Murray:

‘Torture is torture’ ignores the complex nature of intelligence gathering

Murray appeared on the BBC’s ‘This Week’ putting some of the points he raises in the article……but will any of his concerns be reflected in subsequent BBC reporting?  The BBC has a habit of having such discussions on controversial issues but entirely failing to filter the relevant findings through to the news department or its presenters who carry on as if there is no other line to take other than the one chosen by the BBC in its general reporting, shows and news bulletins.

Here there’s not a single utterance of any doubt about the Senate Committee’s report.

But in this article the BBC actually looks at some of the nuances so often left out by the everyday news and current affairs discussions on BBC shows…such as the fact that the Senate Intelligence Committee was the ‘oversight’ committee for the CIA and its activities……if torture was going on they must have known about it….the Democrats claim the CIA lied to them…but even the BBC admits the interrogation techniques were an ‘open secret’….

Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat who heads up the Senate Intelligence Committee, spoke on Tuesday on the Senate floor.  This committee oversees the CIA, and agency officials are required to tell committee members about their activities.

Yet she said the CIA officials misled her and others about the interrogation programme, keeping it a closely-guarded secret.

The real story is more complicated.

The CIA’s interrogation programme, for example, was a badly-kept secret.

People all over Washington knew what was going on. Condoleezza Rice, as President George W Bush’s national security adviser, said she would “not object”, according to the report.

Others at the White House followed suit.

 

The CIA was religiously demanding written sanction for their interrogations….did the SIC not know of these requests and if not why were they not asking about them?

In this climate of fear Mr Rizzo and other CIA officials were grappling with the prospect of conducting interrogations for the first time in the agency’s history.

Mr Rizzo paved the way for the harsh interrogations by ensuring they fell within the parameters of the law. He did it in the way a lawyer does: He got it in writing.

Between 2002 and 2005 the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel lawyers wrote several memos about interrogations, saying the methods could not be described as torture.

 

And:

According to the report, then-CIA Director Michael Hayden said: “every committee member was ‘fully briefed,‘ and that ‘this is not CIA’s programme. This is not the president’s programme. This is America’s programme.'”

People at the White House knew what the CIA was doing. So did people in Congress, as well as lawyers and journalists.

 

How then did the Democrats on the SIC not know anything….or are they just telling porkies for political gain?

I haven’t heard a BBC presenter talking on this issue who doesn’t start from the point that the Senate Intelligence Committee [failing to mention it was Democratic and didn’t interview any CIA people] found the CIA guilty of torturing people and went on from there to lead the discussion down a path that inevitably didn’t reach the right conclusions due to being based on a false premise to start with.

Will you see such important considerations reflected in the BBC’s everyday coverage when you listen to programmes from the likes of Nicky Campbell and Peter Allen that probably get the bulk of the BBC’s audience?  I doubt it if past history is anything to go by…..look how the BBC reported the FIFA ‘investigation’ into corruption in the bidding process for the world cup when Russian and Qatar were allegedly cleared of any corruption whilst England were pilloried…and the BBC fully accepted that narrative until new revelations that couldn’t be ignored came along.

The narrative will be ‘CIA (Neo-con Republican approved) tortured people, Britain may be involved, this is a moral outrage and a stain on the West…isn’t it?’ with all the nuance, depth, complexity, and the failure to pin the blame on a single guilty party,  removed.

There is another angle on the business of interrogation that looks at whether ‘torture’ is effective…the BBC has decided it has been proven not to work,  choosing to highlight this finding:

What did the Senate committee find out?

1) The CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.

2)The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.

But do they work?…….

The enhanced techniques work.

The Central Intelligence Agency repeatedly tortured suspected terrorists, regularly lied about it to Congress and the White House, and, for all the pain and trouble this caused the agency and the United States, didn’t end up extracting a single piece of valuable information not readily available by other means.

That, at least, is the conclusion of the forthcoming Feinstein report, a long and, in certain quarters, much-anticipated review of the CIA’s detainee and interrogation programs during the Bush administration.

Now, for the first time, one of the lead interrogators is attempting to tell the other side of the story. Writing under the pseudonym Jason Beale, he has produced a provocative 39-page document in an effort to counter the narrative pushed by Democrats and amplified by journalists eager to discredit the program.

News accounts of the forthcoming Feinstein report make clear that a central claim of that narrative will be its most contentious: The techniques didn’t work.

Beale challenges that contention on the basis of his experience in the U.S. military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) course taken by intelligence and military personnel exposed to a high risk of capture.

Here is the actual document from the interrogator that reveals the duplicity of the Democrats who now deny all knowledge of the interrogation programme…..

An Interrogator Breaks His Silence

When your unanimous and full-throated opposition to the program you once supported hinges upon the notion that it was not only immoral, but ineffective –  because how can you explain shutting down a program, however objectionable, which was effective at pulling actionable intelligence out of high value Al Qaeda leadership detainees?

When the President who signed the executive order shutting down the program, having actually seen the intelligence after being inaugurated and spoken with the leadership at CIA, changes his campaign trail characterization from “It didn’t work; people will say anything to make it stop” to “even if it did produce some information, we don’t know if we could have gotten that information using standard techniques.”

When the only viable narrative remaining is that it was approved by Democrats briefed on the program, it had the full support of briefed Democrats until it (and the notion of their support) became public, those same Democrats then characterized it as ineffective and immoral, yet significant doubt remains after credible claims that information gathered in the program led to Bin Laden.

You [the Democrats of the SIC] can count on the media and various pundits to advance your position in an incurious and uncritical manner.

I know that we couldn’t have collected the same information using standard techniques because I was an expert in using standard techniques –  I used them thousands of times over two decades –   and the notion that I could have convinced the detainees [redacted] to provide closely-held information without the use of EITs is laughable. There is zero chance. Zero.