Who has said sorry? Cheney? Bush? Rice? The people who put this system into place continue to defend it and have suffered no consequences.
https://www.aclu.org/national-security/fact-sheet-extraordin...
Beginning in the early 1990s and continuing to this day, the Central Intelligence Agency, together with other U.S. government agencies, has utilized an intelligence-gathering program involving the transfer of foreign nationals suspected of involvement in terrorism
The current policy traces its roots to the administration of former President Bill Clinton. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, however, what had been a limited program expanded dramatically,
Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.
Well, in the past they've said that. Mostly now, they seem to be more avoiding commenting on the substance at all, and just saying that its wrong to publish the report.
This is not about extraordinary rendition -- which certainly is an extremely disturbing practice, and by all accounts seems to have included instances where prisoners were tortured by other countries with the knowledge and at least tacit consent of the US in violation of US obligations under international law.
This is about systematic torture directly executed by an agency of the United States government, under false pretenses, and while making damaging deceptions about the program to other entities within the US government.
There is certainly an extent to which it fits in with a common pattern with extraordinary rendition, but its not the same thing.
You must have missed this part of my post:
Let me be perfectly clear when I say this. It shouldn't matter which party started this, ITS WRONG.
Sure glad all the downvoters actually read my ENTIRE post before they started getting trigger happy with their downvotes.
That's what we're talking about here: the actual meaning of "gloves off". And no, this was categorically NOT something that started on Clinton's watch. It's started on Bush's watch, specifically at the direction of Cheney and his legal counsel David Addington, using legal justifications drafted by John Yoo.
Bush, not Clinton, got it?
And just so you're clear, this is not a defense of Democrats. After all, nobody has done more to forestall this report than the Democrat Barack Obama. In many ways, he's the worst offender here as it was his administration that elected to protect the people involved instead of punishing them, which serves to normalize something that absolutely should not be normalized. After all, the deepest institutional damage is done not by those who abuse their authority, but by those who allow the abusers to get away with it (see the systematic sexual abuse of children and the problems the Catholic Church caused itself by concealing it for another case in point).
I should add that the Obama Administration's conduct would be slightly less galling if it weren't part of a pattern, but the fact that James Clapper suffered no consequence for lying to Congress about the NSA's constitutional violations means that this is bigger than the CIA. If you get to the root of it, it's really about the goddamn nightmare of a lawless and amoral security state given big budgets and free reign stemming from the insane over-reaction to 9/11 that has since been enshrined in the Patriot Act.
That's the real heart of darkness here. Well, that and the cowering bedwetting chickenshits who don't support the whole "land of the free home of the brave" thing, and would rather hand the country to people like Cheney, Addington, Yoo, etc. and not think twice about the damage they're doing.
And those people? The fear driven chickenshits? Overwhelmingly Republican. It's the FOX News demographic, essentially. (FOX News, not coincidentally, has been a big supporter of torture. Like Cheney, they consider it evidence of "toughness", not idiocy.)