Not that they'd listen to me or anything but, if I were the gang at the Pulitzer committee, I'd get a head start on putting Spencer Ackerman's name on the National Reporting plaque right now, just to save themselves the work next spring.

Getting someone to talk on the record is the eternal jackpot of investigative reporting, and, in today's Guardian, Ackerman hits the Comstock Lode with Daniel Jones, who was the chief investigator for the Senate intelligence committee when that committee was looking into the practice of rendition and torture and the other extraconstitutional horrors perpetrated in our name by the late Avignon Presidency, and who also looked on in anger as the CIA worked overtime to ratfck the investigation and to bury its result. This is the first of a three-part series. I'd say that the extended weekend forecast calls for fury and outrage.

It begins with a holy-shit moment straight out of a paranoid political thriller, except that it was real, and it happened here. From The Guardian:

There was one document in particular that proved it. Jones and his team had found it years before, placed mysteriously onto a shared computer network drive the Senate intelligence committee investigators were using in northern Virginia, not far from CIA headquarters. But they hadn't appreciated its full significance until the agency, in an attempt at refuting a report that was still far from publication, told Barack Obama's staff that the committee was pushing a hysterical interpretation of the agency's fateful post-9/11 embrace of torture. The document, prepared for Leon Panetta when he was CIA director, had reached the same conclusions about the torture program that Jones had. As long as Jones had it, he would be able to show that the agency knew full well how brutal the torture was; how ineffective its torturers considered it to be; and how thoroughly the CIA had covered all of that up. As long as Jones had the document, that is. Lurking in the back of his mind was the event that had led him to devote five years of ceaseless work, through nights and weekends: the CIA had already destroyed evidence of torture. It did that before the Senate had launched an investigation, and long before that investigation had turned acrimonious. Inside the small room in Virginia the CIA had set up for the Senate investigators, Jones reached for his canvas messenger bag. He slipped crucial printed-out passages of what he called the Panetta Review into the bag and secured its lock. Sometime after 1am, Jones walked out, carrying his bag as he always did, and neglecting to tell the agency security personnel what it contained. After years of working together, no one asked him to open the bag.

And thus was saved a document that gave the lie to everything the CIA ever said in public about how it squandered the moral authority of the United States in the world. It is important to note, as Ackerman does, that Jones didn't remove this document to leak it—no Ellsberg, he—but to make sure that the cover-up artists from Langley didn't burn the thing.

It is no exaggeration to say that this is the best look into how badly wrong things went after 9/11 published by anyone since Charlie Savage's work on executive orders won a Pulitzer for The Boston Globe. And, as Ackerman also makes clear, Jones's fears were very well-founded. And he and Jones are quite bipartisan in their concern that the historical record be preserved from bureaucratic interment.

But the CIA has gone beyond successfully suppressing the report. In a grim echo of Jones's fears, the agency's inspector general, Langley recently revealed, destroyed its copy – allegedly an accident. Accountability for torture has been the exclusive province of a committee investigation greeted with antipathy by Obama. While Obama prides himself on ending CIA torture, the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump, has vowed if elected to "bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding". Key CIA leaders defending the agency against the committee, including Brennan and former director Michael Morrell, are reportedly seeking to run Langley under Hillary Clinton.

Almost more infuriating than what is allegedly in the report itself are the extraordinary steps that the CIA took to frustrate the investigation, which included the damned near treasonous effort to spy on the Senate while it did its work. I said "almost."

What they found, over a half a year's work examining just two detainees' interrogations from the first year of the torture program, shocked them. It was widely known by 2008 that Abu Zubaydah was tortured. But Jones and Starkzak did not expect to see internal accounts detailing, by the minute, what the CIA did to him. They didn't know, for instance, that interrogators had tortured him to the point that he would obey, like a dog, when they would snap their fingers, nor that they left a man suspected of knowing al-Qaida's secrets alone for 47 days. The cables describe Abu Zubaydah as kept naked, filthy, stinking, shaking with fear, shoved inside a filth-riddled wooden box, defecating on himself. Agency personnel, in the official communications, get emotional and request transfers rather than continue torturing men they come to believe lack relevant information on terrorism. It immediately raised the question of what the CIA was really doing to dozens of other detainees at its black sites. "I don't think the CIA even knew what they were giving us, to be honest," Jones said.

Holy mother of god.

Nobody comes out of this report very well. Leon Panetta's reputation gets its bell rung pretty hard. John Brennan is exposed as somebody you wouldn't trust to park your car. And why, Mark Udall, why didn't you read the report into the Senate record after you lost re-election the way so many people begged you to do?

Summarizing it here is unfair both to Ackerman's diligence and Jones's courage. Read the whole damn thing. Read the next two installments. And remember that the monsters who did these things are still among us, still drawing breaths of free air, still drawing salaries, still working in the government of what is supposed to be a democratic republic, and very likely to be working in that government next January no matter who wins.

Panetta's out there as a prime surrogate for the campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton. The candidate herself, as Tiger Beat On The Potomac tells us, is meeting with a "bipartisan" group of "national security experts," which includes some people mentioned quite prominently in The Guardian's report.

Hillary Clinton will meet with a bipartisan group of former national security officials on Friday, a group that includes ousted former CIA Director David Petraeus and former George W. Bush Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff… Others on the list—which is not yet final—include former Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano; John Allen, the former special presidential envoy for the Global Coalition to Counter ISIL; former acting Homeland Security Secretary Rand Beers; former acting deputy CIA director Michael Morell; former National Counterterrorism Center Director Matt Olsen; and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander for Europe James Stavridis, who Clinton briefly considered as a running mate earlier this year.

I wonder if this report will come up?

No, actually, I don't wonder at all. I wonder if it will be debated seriously in any of the four debates that will occur between now and the presidential election. No, come to think about it, I don't wonder about that, either. But reading this report is probably the best way to commemorate the attacks of September 11, 2001, that day 15 years ago on which "everything changed."

You're goddamn right everything changed. A thousand pieces, Jack Kennedy once mused, a thousand pieces.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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