From the Christmas Edition of the New Yorker:

It’s hard to describe it as a positive development when a branch of the federal government releases a four-hundred-and-ninety-nine-page report that explains, in meticulous detail, how unthinkable cruelty became official U.S. policy. But last Tuesday, in releasing the long-awaited Senate Select Intelligence Committee report on the C.I.A.’s interrogation-and-detention program, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the committee chairman, proved that Congress can still perform its most basic Madisonian function of providing a check on executive-branch abuse, and that is reason for gratitude.

And…

The report also demonstrates that the agency misrepresented nearly every aspect of its program to the Bush Administration, which authorized it, to the members of Congress charged with overseeing it, and to the public, which was led to believe that whatever the C.I.A. was doing was vital for national security and did not involve torture. Instead, the report shows, in all twenty cases most widely cited by the C.I.A. as evidence that abusive interrogation methods were necessary, the same information could have been obtained, and frequently was obtained, through non-coercive methods. Further, the interrogations often produced false information, ensnaring innocent people, sometimes with tragic results.

Other documents illustrate how the agency misled. In June of 2003, the Vice-President’s counsel asked the C.I.A’.s general counsel if the agency was videotaping its waterboarding sessions. His answer was no. That was technically true, since it was not videotaping them at the time. But it had done so previously, and it had the tapes. The C.I.A. used the same evasion on Senate overseers. A day after a senator proposed a commission to look into detainee matters, the tapes were destroyed. Similar deceptions on many levels are so rife in the report that a reader can’t help but wonder if agency officials didn’t simply regard their cloak of state secrecy as a license to circumvent accountability.

So, will anything change?

It remains to be seen, though, whether the report will spur lasting reform. Darius Rejali, a professor of political science at Reed College and an expert on torture regimes, doubts that it will. For one thing, despite McCain’s testimony, torture is becoming just another partisan issue. This wasn’t always the case—it was Ronald Reagan who signed the U.N. Convention Against Torture, in 1988. But polls show both a growing acceptance of the practice and a widening divide along party lines. “It’s becoming a lot like the death penalty,” Rejali said.

All of which brings me to our current ‘debate’ (such as it is) about online surveillance. It’s interesting to see how affronted contemporary officials and government ministers become at any suggestion that the agencies are not behaving ethically or even legally. The response is to assert indignantly that such behaviour is unthinkable and that it is outrageous even to hint that some officials might behave badly.

Which makes me wonder if all these righteous protesters are either in denial or suffering from a bad case of collective amnesia. It’s not so long ago, for example, that the senior ranks of MI6 harboured a nest of Soviet spies. And I can’t think of a public or semi-public agency in recent years — the BBC, the Metropolitan Police, the Press Complaints Commission, the South Yorkshire police force, the Care Quality Commission), the Catholic church and MPs to name just seven — that has not done things or condoned behaviour that, when exposed, has been deemed unthinkable, unethical or incompetent.

Given what we now know about the recent history of our institutions, it seems statistically improbable that analogous malefaction is not going on in their contemporary equivalents. At any rate, it seems to me to be the most rational default assumption. Why should we believe any assurances from public or corporate spokespersons any more?

One of the astonishing things about democracies is the way in which those in government are allowed to get away with talking nonsense, especially if that nonsense involves ‘national security’, ‘defence’ or war. It was obvious to the meanest intelligence that the British adventure in Afghanistan made no sense, and all that ministerial guff about having British boots on the ground in that benighted land making the streets of Britain safer was pure baloney. And yet ministers from the PM down continued solemnly to intone it, and journalists reported it without much in the way of critical comment.

And now we’re ‘out’ of Afghanistan with nothing to show for it except humiliation, death, injury and humiliation.

Will Hutton has a good column about this in Sunday’s Observer. Excerpt:

None of the multiple and varying objectives set by three prime ministers and six defence secretaries through our engagement in Helmand province over eight years has been met, yet cumulatively it has cost at least £40bn. The bravery of British soldiers cannot be doubted: 453 have died; 247 have had limbs amputated; 2,600 have been wounded. Tragically, many uncounted thousands of Afghans have been killed; too few of them were fighters enlisted by the Taliban.

There is no improved government in Helmand. There has been no hoped-for economic reconstruction: heroin production is higher than it was. The violence between tribes, families and warlords is more entrenched. Helmand is more of a recruiting sergeant for terrorism and jihadism than it was; there have been no security gains. The central government in Kabul is more rather than less threatened. If one aim was to make the British homeland safer by victory in southern Afghanistan – a fantastical claim of last resort – Britain is now less safe.

More widely, our failure in Helmand, following on from the disaster in Basra where our forces were beaten back to the airbase outside the city and only the intervention of the US army allowed an orderly exit, has led to America’s profound re-evaluation of our usefulness as an ally. Tony Blair’s key aims for first invading Iraq to quest for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction and then pivoting into Afghanistan was to prove to the US that we were stalwart allies, consolidate the “special relationship” and so maintain Britain’s standing as a co-upholder, if junior partner, of the world order. In this, he was solidly supported by the “strategists” in the Ministry of Defence and leading generals anxious to defend their budgets.

All that has been completely dashed. Frank Ledwidge in his passionate and revelatory book ‘Investment in Blood’ (the source of the figures above) quotes former vice chief of staff of the US army General Jack Keane speaking at a conference at Sandhurst in late 2013 about the twin debacles of Basra and Helmand: “Gentleman, you let us down; you let us down badly.” Ledwidge continues, having spoken to many senior American military leaders: “This is a common view among senior American soldiers.” The US commander in Afghanistan, General Dan K McNeill, is uncompromising, cited by Jack Fairweather in his no less astounding ‘The Good War’: the British “made a mess of things in Helmand”. Afghanistan has left the special relationship in tatters.

Interesting also to hear soldiers who have served in Afghanistan talk about it. It’s clear that they yearn for a convincing story that would justify the death and mutilation of their comrades. But no such story is forthcoming, for the simple reason that none exists.