Congress Hears That Innocents Tortured Is Fine, Bush's Personality Disorder Bad and 9/11 Death of FBI Agent Good

Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly's national security correspondent, filed a piece last Friday on a bizarre intelligence oversight hearing intended to review the U.S. government's policy of snatching and grabbing suspected terrorists and sending them to secret overseas prisons or to countries that torture people. What happened instead involved a former anti-Bin Laden CIA agent praising the death of his former rival in the FBI John O'Neill. O'Neill, a flamboyant agent who spent years chasing Al Qaeda before 9-11, took the job of head of security for the World Trade Center shortly before 9/11, when he was killed going back into one of the towers..

[Republican Congressman Dana] Rohrabacher tried another avenue. The CIA had made “maybe three” mistaken arrests, he told the Europeans.

Weren’t they maybe obsessing over “due process”? he said. Their concern for civil rights could have “the unfortunate consequence” of helping al Qaeda kill tens of thousands of people in London.

At that, the Code Pink ladies in orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuits who had sat quietly through the hearing began clucking in a “can-you-believe that?” way. The parliamentarians’ jaws cracked open.

Now Rohrabacher was really annoyed.

“Well then,” he barked, “I hope it’s your families. I hope it’s your families that suffer the consequences.”

A roar went up. One of the orange jumpsuiters, a grandmotherly woman with a “no torture” sign, pushed toward the aisle as if a dog had vomited on her lap.

“I don’t have to listen to this,” she said.

Outside, Ann Wright said she had spent “29 years in the military and 16 years as a diplomat,” which included helping reopen the U.S. consulate in Kabul after the Taliban was ousted, before resigning over the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

A CIA Man Speaks His Mind on Secret Abductions