| Perhaps he could have the opinion that, as he tweeted, "the CIA saved American lives" in good faith. But he was criticizing a 525-page Senate report on the same day it came out, December 9th. This report has a lot of details on CIA misrepresentations on how they "saved lives". I doubt he read the report before he tweeted. I don't think that's in good faith. It is in good company, as Dick Cheney admitted he hadn't read the report, while still asserting it was "full of crap". Let me give a single example of the kind of CIA claims about the effectiveness of torture that the report documents. On page 188, the report describes a briefing George Tenet and a CIA lawyer gave to some White House officials. (See footnote 1101 for a partial list of attendees.) Their slides included the claim that their torture techniques helped identify Richard Reid. Richard Reid was arrested before the CIA tortured anyone under this program. This program could not have helped catch Reid unless it also involved the use of a time machine. You may think this is a silly example, but the report documents dozens of instances of this level of misrepresentation. Footnote 1393 demonstrates another causality inversion that the CIA thinks they caused, in which they tortured someone in 2003 to get enough information to disrupt a plot in 2002. Check it out for yourself; you can read the Senate report's 525-page executive summary here: http://www.intelligence.senate.gov/study2014/sscistudy1.pdf and the CIA's response here: https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/CIAs_June2013_Response_t... Maybe I'm wrong about torture, and maybe I'm misreading or misunderstanding the report. But I think Conway's dismissal of the report without reading it is in bad faith. |