Truest statement of the week

Conflicts over the release of a long-delayed US Senate investigation report into the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture program have produced a deepening crisis for the Obama administration. Under conditions where the expanding repressive apparatus of the American state—from the CIA and the NSA down to local police departments—is increasingly viewed as illegitimate, there are growing concerns in ruling circles about the international and domestic consequences of the public release of a report exposing systematic criminality at the highest levels.
It emerged on Friday that Secretary of State John Kerry took the unprecedented step of contacting Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein directly to urge her to “consider” further delaying the release of the report. Feinstein, a Democrat from California, chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was responsible for producing the report. According to State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki, Kerry made the call “because a lot is going on in the world, and he wanted to make sure that foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing.”

The implications for American imperialist foreign policy are obvious. The government of the United States asserts the power to invade, bomb and carry out “humanitarian intervention” and “regime change” anywhere in the world in the name of protecting “human rights.” Meanwhile, top military, civilian and intelligence officials of that same country are implicated in the gravest violations of human rights, as well as in conspiracies to cover up those crimes—and nobody has been held accountable.

-- Tom Carter, "The CIA torture report and the crisis of legitimacy in the United States" (WSWS).