THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

The Republican Party having made torture part of the Great American Exceptionalism, is using their control of the US Senate to cover up and maintain the secrets of their abomination.

When the Senate Intelligence Committee released the much anticipated executive summary of the full report on the CIA’s torture program on Dec. 9, details of techniques like extreme sleep deprivation and anal rehydration gripped the country.

Now the committee’s new Republican chairman is trying to make sure that disclosure is its last.

Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., took over as the committee’s chairman in January, after the GOP midterm landslide gave control of the Senate to the Republicans. An intelligence hawk, he has quickly moved to keep documents related to the CIA’s interrogation program out of the public eye and the Intelligence Committee under tight control.

That has angered many critics who say that GOP control of the vital committee is a blow to transparency and will lead to greater secrecy around such controversial government policies...

On Dec. 10, then–Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein sent a copy of the full torture report, which is still classified, to President Barack Obama and to seven other top executive branch officials involved with national security. “The full report should be made available within the CIA and other components of the executive branch for use as broadly as appropriate to help make sure that this experience is never repeated,” she said in her cover letter to Obama, which asked him to use the full report in future CIA training programs.

Burr disagreed. Shortly after he took over as committee chairman, he sent an unusual letter to Obama asking him to return all copies of the full report. Burr referred Feinstein to the Senate parliamentarian for allegedly violating Intelligence Committee rules when she sent the full report to the executive branch. The parliamentarian cleared Feinstein of wrongdoing, but Burr was undeterred. “We’ll proceed to whatever the next step is gonna’ be,” he recently told The Huffington Post. “I think there will be a next step, but it probably won’t be a public one.”

A representative for Feinstein directed Al Jazeera to a press release in which she said, “I strongly disagree that the administration should relinquish copies of the full committee study, which contains far more detailed records than the public executive summary.”

And let us not think this is a mere partisan battle in Congress.Those familiar with the full extent of the CIA torture do not mince their words.

“The people who were involved in the program, who were its architects and implementers, have an understandable desire to minimize all of this — to seek to prevent a full discussion and perhaps a full awareness of the report,” said Alberto Mora, a fellow at the Carr Center for Human Rights, who argued against harsh interrogation tactics as general counsel for the Navy from 2001 to 2006.

“Most of us were staggered by the degree of brutality [in the summary] and the precision with which it was depicted,” he said. “That’s why I say it strips away the façade of the interrogation not being torture, which was the claim by the apologists for that particular practice.”

But the Republican Party, which has adopted electoral and legislative techniques of the Bolsheviks of a hundred years ago, want us to fully embrace our inner Dzerzhinsky as well. It works so well when you know what you want to get.