So, the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA "Abuses" has been out for a week or two now--

You can read on the Huffington Report what those CIA "abuses" are supposed to have been--bad indeed, you might think, if you've never seen the pictures from Abu Ghraib, or the appalling video "Collateral Murder," and if you've somehow managed not to hear about our own Military Intelligence 's torturing of children, or the slitting of babies' throats in front of their parents--or if you know nothing of those bodies dumped every morning before dawn in the streets of Mosul and Fallujah bearing "signs of torture" (i.e., with their faces flayed and their fingernails torn off); or maybe, really, after all, not such bad things.  Hardly bad enough to get the CIA abolished. Funny. Could somebody still be covering things up? Could it be that we are still not being told the Whole Truth?

Who said that torture has anything whatsoever the fuck to do with eliciting information?  Or with interrogation, for that matter?  Of course the head of the CIA did say it--but why in the name of Christ was he allowed to say it?

I didn't talk to Bill Weaver, our "Guru," for a decade or so after I first knew him, about his direct experience, towards the end of World War II, of the Nazi death camps: sniping out S.S. guards (as I had heard he did) before the Red Cross got there, at Dachau and Belsen--but finally, one evening in the late 70's, during one of what had become our regular "family parties," I put it to him: "So, what would you say, is the Truth of the Nazi death camps?"

And, after a slight pause, half reluctantly, half didactically, Bill said, "Never believe that those stories about the hot-lead enemas are not true."

Then he said, "there was one thing about the Nazis, though--a space I could not make--how they could pick a baby up by its heels and dash its head against the wall."