I like Ron Wyden, but what he says here is bullshit. Nothing will stop this from happening again if no one goes to prison over it — and I’d say the odds are really small:
U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden explained today why he voted to declassify the Senate Intelligence Committee’s apparently scathing 6,200-page report on the CIA’s detention and brutal interrogation of overseas terrorism suspects.
“I believe the American people will be profoundly disturbed by the contents of this report,” the senior senator from Oregon wrote in a news release. “Though I can’t provide any details until that declassification process is finished, I can say that the American people will see that much of what CIA officials have said about the effectiveness of coercive interrogations was simply untrue.”
[…]”I have spoken about the intelligence leadership’s culture of misinformation before and it continues to be a problem to this day,” Wyden said in his news statement. “I have also been asking questions publicly for years about the role that outside contractors played in the interrogation program and I hope the American people will soon get some answers to those questions.”
[…]”It is going to make many people uncomfortable,” he wrote, “but getting the facts about torture out to the American people will keep these mistakes from being repeated and make our national intelligence agencies stronger and more effective in the long run.
