Some years ago the National Reconnaissance Office started to
build a new headquarters building in Chantilly, Virginia. After
a while it was revealed that the building was going to overrun its cost
estimate by $2-$3 billion. A couple of
Senators made a big public deal of how this was outrageous, and how if they had
known the NRO was going to build such a building they would have objected. BUT
I happen to know that these very same Senators had been given a private tour of
the half-finished building only a few months before (during which they admired
the design), so in fact they had known about the building, and its cost
overruns, all along. So their “outrage” was just public posturing.
The story comes to mind now because of the
phony outrage from politicians (mostly Democrats) about the newly-released
report from the Senate Intelligence Committee about CIA interrogation
techniques. I say “phony” because just about everyone in Washington, and most people
around the country, have known about
these techniques for some years now. There
have been numerous articles about it over the past decade, and a good bit of public
debate about the morality of “enhanced interrogation techniques”. So to suddenly get outraged about it now is
just more public posturing – and perhaps an attempt from some politicians to
distance themselves from the issue now that it is more public, though they kept
quiet, or even supported the CIA, before all this got so much publicity.
There is no question that these techniques
are immoral, and even more to the point, the evidence suggests that they didn’t
produce much of any useful information. Professional interrogators (which these
people apparently were not) know that the best results generally come from building
a trusting relationship with the suspect, not from waterboarding them. But they did probably generate more enemies
for America, and lower our standing around the world. We are hardly in a position to lecture authoritarian
regimes on their human rights issues in the light of our own actions.
But this new public outrage over what everyone has known for
years is just another disgusting case of hypocritical political theater - something we see far too much of from Washington these days.
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