Dianne Feinstein should be remembered for her epic battle against CIA torture
National Post, 04 October 2023
The CIA fought ferociously to hide what it had done in the aftermath of 9/11, but the senator would not be intimidated
On Thursday the Democratic Party will gather in San Francisco for the funeral of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, mayor of the city in the 1980s and elected to the United States Senate in 1992.
In 1984, the Democratic National Convention went to San Francisco. Then-mayor Feinstein was a contender to be chosen as the vice-presidential nominee — the first woman to be a national ticket. The choice went to Geraldine Ferraro of New York, but Feinstein and her San Francisco Democrats — a Silicon Valley party for the rich and socially liberal — were on the ascendancy.
Vice-President Kamala Harris of San Francisco will be at the funeral, eager to succeed President Joe Biden when the time comes. Also present will be California Governor Gavin Newsom, former mayor of San Francisco, positioning himself to succeed Biden next year if the octogenarian president can be pushed out.
Feinstein was the matriarch of the San Francisization of the Democratic Party. Yet as she is buried she should be most remembered for her defiance of the Obama administration in 2014 over torture.
In 2009, Sen. Feinstein was the MC of Barack Obama’s inauguration. It was a heady time; she got to introduce Aretha Franklin — the highlight of the inaugural — and was the new chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. With a Democratic president and congress, happy times were foreseen. Yet by 2014, Feinstein was locked in a fierce battle with the Obama administration, which did not want Feinstein’s committee to release a report on torture by the CIA.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the “war or terror” included Guantanamo Bay and CIA “black sites,” secret facilities where the protections of U.S. law were limited. The Bush administration’s “torture memos” provided a legal opinion that “enhanced interrogation” techniques — torture in common parlance — could be carried out on foreign nationals outside of the United States. Such torture was conducted at black sites in Iraq and elsewhere. It came to public attention in 2004 with reports, including photographs, about American abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib near Baghdad.
The Bush administration claimed that Abu Ghraib was an aberration, and the personnel on site were punished for being rogue actors.
They weren’t rogue actors. The CIA’s detention and interrogation program was widespread and authorized at the highest levels. Even after leaving office, vice-president Dick Cheney defended “enhanced interrogation” as not being “torture.” He considered it, to the contrary, to be legal, necessary and appropriate.
“Enhanced interrogation” included waterboarding (the sensation of drowning), physical assault, sleep deprivation, exposure to heat and cold, hunger, prolonged painful postures, extreme confinement and — pardon the language — “rectal rehydration and feeding.”
Sen. Feinstein disagreed with Cheney’s view from the first time she was briefed on the secret program in 2006. In 2007, the intelligence committee learned that the CIA, contrary to White House instructions, had destroyed tapes of torture as they feared incalculable reputational damage should video emerge of what agents had done.
Continue reading at the National Post.